Empire: World History - 251. Victorian Narcos: Flooding China With Indian Opium (Ep 5)

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Who were Jardine and Matheson? What was life like for workers growing opium in India? How does George Orwell relate to the East India Company opium trade?  William and Anita explore how William Jardine and James Matheson accumulated immense power and wealth by becoming international drug dealers in the 1830s… Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com.  Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. We left you with one of my favourite episodes, which is when diplomacy goes by. And it really went very, very badly with the McCartney mission that should have been fab, like, you know, not even a quarter of the fab for, a full, four quarters of fabulousness,

with Lord McCarney going over to the Chinese and wooing them for their trade, their friendship, diamond-studded, mulberry suit. It's just, which we found preposterous from beginning to end. His diving bell, his hot air balloon. I mean, he'd done so much homework. He did try. He did try. But everything that could have gone wrong went wrong for him.

But instead at the end of that episode, we left you with a situation where that balance of payments, which was so in favour of China, because all English silver was going towards China for the tea, the insatiable appetite for tea. But it starts to balance out, not because they've got a trade deal, but because very quietly, and on the slide and on the quiet, the opium trade. which is being mastered by British people. You know, some private individuals who want to make their name have found out how to get opium into China.

And William gave us some figures towards the end of that, which is how quickly that opium trade was growing. And this episode, William, is about two particular individuals who are going to be inextricably linked with the now astronomical rise of that opium trade in China. One Mr. Jardine and one Mr. Matheson. And if Jardine Matheson rings a bell, that's because that entity that was sort of grown out of those, well, poppy seeds, if you like, exists today. That's a major player still in Hong Kong and in China.

And it is an extraordinary story. The way that the British ultimately end up going to war in order to facilitate the narcotics trade. everything that the opposite of the current war on drugs, the British are fighting for private drug dealers. It's an astonishing moment in imperial history and illustrates as well as anything the kind of absurdly venal nature of imperialism, of the way that the entire enterprise of the East India Company operated. Now, one of the things that the McCartney mission was trying to do was to give the British traders greater access to China, because they were hemmed in on a single riverbank outside Canton and were not even allowed to visit Canton itself.

It was an incredibly restricted life where the different foreign communities were hedged in in little compounds, each one facing the river, each one with its own flag. And that had been the case since the 1720s, and it continued, despite the efforts of the McCartney mission, to change that. I can't stress this enough how strictly this was enforced. So we mentioned that wonderful Stephen Platt book in the last episode. Imperial Twilight.

Wonderful, wonderful book. But we're talking about people who had not even been a mile and a half up the road from their particular area of containment. and contonement. They wouldn't be allowed and they also would not dare. So they hadn't even seen the roads connecting their containment to the next habitable place. It was that hermetically sealed their existence. And yet from that walled compound, these guys were making fortunes. They were becoming the richest traders in the world in the single largest trade that was going on between the two largest empires in the world, the British Empire and the great Manchu Empire of China.

To give you a slightly more visual take on the compounds that they're walled into, there's several of them in a line, and the large ones have the flags of the country they represent on the riverfront, Britain, France, the United States. and inside these compounds, they have everything they need to live. And they're looked after by a vast Chinese staff. There are stewards, servants, cooks, valets, butlers, menial servants to pull the punkers and to deliver them food, some pens with livestock, pigs, cows, sheep. And inside some of these buildings, you have,

chandeliers and portraits and chapels and all the paraphernalia of a sort of colonial outpost. But what's important to remember is that none of these are actually owned by the British, the French, or the United States. They're just leased. Because none of these guys are in charge here. Yeah, it's the Chinese who are running the show. And the buildings, every single one of them, are owned by Chinese merchants who rent them out to the foreign traders. and the servants are employed not ultimately by the foreigners who are being served, but by their Chinese superiors. And so it's a very different situation from a colonial situation.

These guys are very well-tended prisoners in a sense, prisoners who are allowed to make fortunes, prisoners who are given every luxury, but they're not in control of their own lives. They're hemmed into these little compounds as long as they want to stay and as long as they continue to make money. I just just a little more insight on this kind of prison compound, as you put it. I mean, there are worse places to be. There's living apartments which are really, really spacious, and as you said, beautifully decorated. A dining room for more than 100 guests, a billiard room, a library, and the library on its own has 4,000 books. Not going short of reading matter, yeah.

Well, I mean, they can't go up the road, so what else can they, what else is there to do but from play billiards, read books and make money? And that's what they are. I mean, factories in only one sense, and they're factories, as William said in a previous episode, because those people representing the nation are called factors. So they are factories. They are not industrial sites in any way. But if they are churning something out, it is money. It is the ability to make money.

And there is a voracious appetite to make more money. They can see what the potential is, even though they can't reach their left arm and their right arm further than the walls of their own compound and a compound that doesn't even belong to them. So, I mean, whose idea, first of all, is this to keep them contained? This is very much a Chinese ideal that you're not going to come and you'll corrupt our people. Yeah, you're not corrupting our people and you're not corrupting our way of life. And what's important to remember is that these compounds are only there for the licit trade, for the legal trade. So this is all about buying tea from the

Chinese. But that, as we know, is only half the picture. And alongside this, there is a completely different illegal trade going on, often by the same people, but at one remove, using Chinese gangsters, bringing in opium and uploading it off little offshore islands, uninhabited places where they can transfer them to the boats called crabs of Chinese gangsters who then distribute it around the Chinese interior. And beyond that, beyond this sort of double system, the licit and the illicit, the legal and the illegal, you have a growing and increasingly repressive machinery in India of the East India Company State, which won't touch the opium in China because it's illegal, but grows it, plans it, sets the price, sets the quality, owns the

factories and determines the lives of the planters in Bihar and in Bengal, who, are producing this most profitable of crops. So, I mean, if you were to look at it as an industry, you have the entire supply chain from seed to export, which is controlled by the British, the East India Company largely. But distribution then needs to be a bilateral affair. And it's not legal. It is not allowed. It is not meant to be something that is claimed by a country, but even though it's been

cornered by one particular country. So this kind of thuggery and a sort of an almost parallel militarisation that is going on is going to prove crucial in what we've referred to before, a growing appetite for opium in China and the violent illicit ways it is distributed around the country and also the way in which that monopoly is protected and controlled. What I think we should look at now is the increasing power and the increasingly repressive authority of the East India Company's opium department. Now this, as we said, is not involved in selling opium to the Chinese. It's only involved in the manufacture and the creation of opium. But as opium becomes a more and more important crop, the East India Company gives over more and more of

Bihar, the entire area as far as Benares, which is now in Uttar Pradesh, to this crop. And by the second half of the 19th century, roughly half a million acres have come to be sown with poppy. And it's very labour-intensive agriculture. They probably control the lives of between five and seven million people. Those numbers are eye-watering. You need to understand how, if you are in control of that many people, you have their fates entirely in your hands. So just as later on with India and when it's the Raj that's in charge and they tell farmers and growers that they must grow indigo instead of food crops, the same thing is happening here with Opian and the East India Company. If you're in control of five to seven million people,

what you're telling them is this is what you will do. We're in charge of you. You will grow this stuff. And sometimes, you know, the side effect of that is that you have farmers who aren't able to feed their families. Well, the system is that the man in charge of district is the opium agent, which is a deceptively humble title for a man that's actually very highly paid and very, very powerful and controls a great area of India. And he has below him British East India Company officials, then local strongmen below that at the next level. One of these, for example, is Henry Osborne, who keeps a diary that Amitav Ghosh writes about in his wonderful book.

Smoke and Ashes. And ashes. And he writes that Henry Osbourne sleeps with a pistol under his mattress, suffering frequent bouts of depression, some brought about by his wife's singing. So you can see this unhappy couple stuck in the middle of Bihar. Everyone's a critic. That's really harsh. But this is interesting.

Listen. So Osborne has got a colleague called Richard W. Blair, who has brought his family out to live in the small town of Bihar, where he's posted as sub-depity. opium agents. He's a very junior figure in this hierarchy. And it's there in a place called Motihari, near the Nepal border, that Eric Blair, who later took the name, George Orwell, is born in 2003 at the very end of this story. I mean, George Orwell, people, that's what he said. I just want to repeat it in case, you know, they didn't hear it, the George Orwell, born in India, son of a sub-deputy opium agent. It's extraordinary. And he, of course, is quickly, like all children of the Raj, sent abroad for education,

that whole world that Kipling writes about in Bar-Bar Blacksheet. So he's sent away, so he doesn't grow up amid these poppy fields. But he does, when he comes back as a junior imperial policeman, he does smoke it. In Burma, because he's stationed in Burma, isn't he? I mean, that's where he's a police officer. Exactly. Certainly he implies that, because he says, in one of his writings in his Burma book, Burmese days, what are.

the pleasures of opium. Like other pleasures, they are fortunately indescribable. So it's very interesting, although we're talking about the 1830s in this episode, this continues on right through to Orwell, who is the great mystic, if you like, of authoritarianism in the mid-20th century, the author of 1984, the author of Animal Farm and a host of other extraordinary classics. And just as with Animal Farm, you know, you have pigs running things and everybody else running themselves ragged to try and supply the pigs. I mean, all I would have been aware of how difficult the lives of the opium farmers were who were trying to fulfill these orders that are coming from, you know, apart from anyone else, his dad and others who work above his dad,

because it is a wretched life for an opium grower. First of all, the prices are fixed. You have no say in what your crop is worth. You're just told this is what you're growing. It is set by, you know, Brits who come and they tell you what you have to do. and it is a very low rate. I mean, you've got some numbers, William, which will just tell you how much into poverty it plunged people to grow up. So I very much relying here on Amitav Ghosh's books,

Smok and Ashes. And Amitav is a friend. He has written three extraordinary novels set amid the opium fields of Bihar and the Canton Opium Wars and the lives of indentured labourers. It's a brilliant trilogy. And Smok and Ashes, he talks about the source

of his fiction. He talks about the big Ghazipur opium factory, which is the industrial center of the opium trade. It's set up at the time of Lord Cornwallis, who famously was the man who surrendered to Washington, who in the 1780s at Yorktown hands over the keys of America to Washington, and then gets recruited by the East India company, where among the many reforms that he makes in India, he sets up this quasi-military force. like opium factory, surrounded by high red brick walls. And he turns Ghazipur, which had previously been a Mughal centre in the middle of what's now Uttar Pradesh, into a company town dedicated entirely to the creation of opium. It was a pretty miserable life for the humans who

work in it. They're barefoot. The processing is done entirely by hand. These barefoot workers spend as much as 10 hours a day, according to Amitav, tramping up and down the long vats of opium. The fumes are so heavy, he writes, that they often become sleepy and lethargic. Many visitors remark on the powerful smell that pervades the factory. The air is redolent with opium, not with narcotic and purified odor of the finished drug, but the odor of indescribable nastiness. One of the people who visits it is Kipling, as we just talked about him. And the only people that seem to be happy in this miserable, industrial narcotic centre

are the troops of monkeys who apparently love to lap up the efforts that flow out of the factory's drains. Are they're high monkeys? According to Amitam, they're the most contented and tranquil monkeys in all of Hindustan. So, I mean, apart from having, you know, sort of junkie monkeys. Junkie monkeys! Isn't that great? Very good. The numbers that I was trying to wheedle out of you.

I'll give them now because I found them now. So, I mean, the rate at which the price of opium was fixed is so ridiculously low. And it stays at this rate. It's three rupees and 50 passer for a sear, which is a little more than a kilogram of raw opium. And that stays the same price for decades. So it doesn't matter what the markets are doing. It doesn't matter what the demand is. It is three and a half rupees for more than a kilogram of raw opium. As William described, before, there is a sort of a refinement process that goes on. A lot of flowers go into manufacturing this clump of black delirium in the impium terms. And so, you know, you can see why, apart from living in what seems like a hellscape from what Amitav writes, you're also always on the verge of starvation because you don't have money. And you also, you have land, but you don't have the wherewithal or the power to grow the things that you need. Food, for example. And Amitav quotes the farmers, he's found petitions by the farmers saying,

can we just grow ordinary food? You know, we just want to grow grain, we want to grow rice, like everybody else. And their petition ends, we cultivate the poppy under pressure from government, otherwise we would not do. And our prayer is that we may be released from this trouble. So these guys have no option but to grow this stuff, which makes everyone money except them. The actual opium farmers, because the price is fixed,

because they're not given the market price. They are poorer and poorer. But this is the most successful trade in early 19th century India. I think it's important to, in a sense, zoom out for a second. India hugely enriched 18th century Britain, particularly because of the textile trade, which was the most advanced in the world, the gorgeous cotton, the amazing silks,

all the calumcari's and painted textiles that India produced were hot property in the 18th century and the British East India Company makes its money by shipping all those textiles abroad. But by the early 19th century, India has ceased to make money because it's now become the Raj, it's all solidified into a very expensive place to administer. And the sums are not adding up. And the only thing which makes the economics work, particularly after the company has lost a lot of money adding Afghanistan or attempting to add Afghanistan to its properties, which again, more than anything else, requires massive troops in forts all over the country to try and keep the Afghans in order.

And it's an enormously expensive place to police and that brings in very little money. So the East Indy company would be completely in the red, but for the amazing success. that they've had with opium sales. And I gave the figures before, but it's worth having them again. You move from about 200 chests of opium in 1767, and that increases within a decade to about 1,000. By 18,200, 20 years later, it's up to 5,000 chess. It actually grows to be the keystone of the colonial economy.

I'd rather like this, which again is from Amitav's book, he has found a year. US National Defence University document which says English merchants led by the East India Company from 1772 to 8050 established an extensive opium supply train creating the world's first drug cartel. I mean he has such a turn of phrase. He has another turn of phrase which I'm going to read out as well from Malthalf's book, which he says, you know, the colonial economy that you've just described, which is underpinned and now carried after, you know, the Raja's taken over and it's now very expensive to run a

country and take control as it has. And he says, like the yeast in bread dough, this is the substance upon which the entire structure depended. I mean, he's a neat writer. He's a very, very memorable thing there. But, I mean, what is the legal situation now? I mean, they've industrialized the production. They have fixed the prices, but you still need to export. And I said that was something that wasn't yet in their hands. But how are the exports growing at the rate at which she suggests they're growing. So that's where we come to these two figures, Jardine and Matheson. So the company, because it's a legal structure, feels that it can grow the opium, it can fill the chess, it can build the factory, organize the farmers into the largest drug cartel in the world,

but it feels it can't actually be responsible for selling it illegally in China. So what happens is that the opium gets sent under guard. I mean, this is very, very valuable material. Some people call it black gold, don't they sometimes? Because it is that valuable. So it gets sent in heavily guarded fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta. It's then put onto the key side and pretty close to the key side. It's auctioned off to private traders. And that's where figures like Jardine and Matheson come in. They buy the opium, they take the risk and it's up to them to distribute it. So the British, of course, know exactly what's going on. This isn't covered at all. But they can deny it in the court of law. I didn't know what's going to happen

to it. Can I just say that these are auctions that are in the open air in front of the busy bustling sort of, you know, key side. It's not, it's not done secretly. There's not, there's not even done in barns at the dead of night. You have these big chests that are on the key side. If you've ever seen in films, you know, they're sort of the auctioning of livestock. You know, they just keep, that is how these auctions take place. That is how these auctions take place. That is how people are outbidding each other, not whispering as you would with an illegal trade, but yelling at the tops of their voices to try and outbid their competitors. So everybody knows, everyone knows this is, you would have to be blind and deaf not to know this is going

on. So it is just to give you plausible deniability that you keep it slightly outside the edge of what you're doing. Now, the British are not the only people who can grow up of course. And as we saw in one of the very first episodes of this series, there has always been traditional opium trade in India. It isn't something that's been introduced by the British, nor even was the idea of selling opium to China, a British innovation. This is something that the moguls and Bengali shippers have been doing for generations. It continues outside company India. Remember at this point in the 1830s, there's a great swathes of India that are not under company control. There's the whole marata areas in central India.

And those areas are also big opium producing centres. So you have, as well as the official East India company, opium trade, which is happening under the opium agency in Bihar, then sending the opium in fleets down the Ganges to Calcutta, where it's being spirited off by private traders away from the eyes of the company and off their books. As well as that, you have a rival consortium growing, whereby in the Maratha territories, in what's now Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka and Maharashtra, you have Indian growers buying opium from peasants who are not under the authority of the opium agency, but nonetheless are being

effectively under almost as much pressure because this is the Mawari money lenders. They're giving loans to poor farmers. Often the farmers like today can't repay it. There's also a measure of coercion. And this opium, which is slightly different, it's has a higher morphine quality. So smokers like it very much. And yet it's less reliable because as it doesn't come out of a single company factory, it's more open to adulteration. So chalk and tulk and all sorts of other things get shoved into it like with modern cocaine on the street of America or Britain or heroin. It's often adulterated. But nonetheless, so there's two completely different streams. And this ends up in Karachi, which in 1830s is not yet under company control.

It will become so by the 1840s. It comes out of Goa, but in particular, it comes out of Bombay. And Bombay is an opium town. And particularly the greatest traders of Bombay, who are the Parsis, that's the Zoroastrians, who fled Iran, set themselves up in Gujarat and then Bombay, and have great, great commercial skills. These guys organize, if you'd like, a rival cartel, which is initially in competition with the company.

But what's fascinating, what we'll see is that. that quite a lot of the British realize that the Parsies are as good or better than they are at this. Well, they're better connected. They're better connected. Absolutely. Yeah. And so what you find is that in many of these cases, the same sort of private traders who are buying company opium on the keys of Calcutta are in business with the Parsies who are doing the Indian opium out of Madhya Pradesh and the central India and exporting it out of Bombay. You've got basically two flavours.

You know, they're two flavours to choose from. And the parses are involved in both, which is, you know, one of the reasons they become, and some families become fabulously wealthy in Bombay. The Bombay Parsons in particular. We're going to talk about some of them in more detail after the break. But just before we take the break, you were telling me in one of our little gossipy chats, and I hope it's all right to share it with the listeners, about a friend of yours that you've just been chatting to, who you said was quite happy to be.

described as a former user of heroin, an opium, who has experienced that kind of Bombay opium den that has remained unchanged for a very long time. So literally this weekend, I was on stage with my friend Jeet Dial, who is one of India's leading poets and a book a shortlisted novelist. Now, Jeet wrote a book a few years ago called Narcopolis, which is about the opium dens in Bombay. And in his youth, he's now in his mid-60s, but in his youth, he remembers going to the last opium dens of Bombay, where people lay down, used these, he called very beautiful antique pipes, which were made especially for this in Bombay. And he said there was a great art to people taking these little balls of opium, giving it just the right contact with the flame, and then getting it going and handing it

to the hipsters. That's where that word comes from because you're lying on your hip. I love that. You said that a couple of episodes ago and I still haven't got over it. Yeah. And Jeet was one of these hipsters and they were abolished in 1984 and Jeet said that it was a catastrophe because the opium that was smoked in Bombay was many times less addictive than heroin and when Bombay opium dems were closed in 1984 almost all the users who got some sort of habit that they were living with often for 20 or 30 years, went over to heroin and the Bombay heroin was the worst quality heroin coming out of Afghanistan. It was a devastating plague. I mean, a number of people who died. Exactly. And he said they all, he said that many of his friends died after the Derns closed. But he has sort of, I mean,

maybe it's just a romantic memory of a man who remembers what he was doing as a teenager and he's now in his mid-60s. But he remembers, extraordinary, because I think of some opium durnes is something that happened in Fumancho novels in 1918. Or 20s or something. People dying all over the place. Yeah, no, absolutely. But this is 1984. So we have had a half with both George Orwell and 1984 in it.

Just saying, weird, isn't it? Join us after the break. Welcome back. So just a 1984, William, was a book by George Orwell. He's just looking at me like, what? What are you about? Between 1984 when the open dens got closed down. Closed down.

Literally you just told us. Anyway. And so often, Anita, I miss. meant so many of your gems. It's weeks later sometimes that they get the punchlines. Can I just say that nothing is as healthy for comedy is explaining it in painful, horrible detail? Say thanks. Thanks to that. Right.

Okay. So we were talking about some of the names that are going to become enormously important. Let's park the Parsi names for a second because we've given you the Parsi landscape and the Bombay landscape. But I want to home in again and in more detail. on these names Jardine and Matheson, who are, as you say, enormous players in the world market today in all sorts of different things, stocks and chairs and other things, real estate, pharmaceuticals and many other things. But in their day, who were William Jardine and James Matheson? And we're talking about now the 1830s.

1830s is what we're going to be homing in because this is the lead up to the first opium war. How on earth did Britain end up going to war for the right to start? sell narcotics. This is one of the great sort of extraordinary stories of imperial history. And if you were to point to two British men that did more than anyone to get Britain into that situation, it would be these two tough as nails Scotsman, William Jardine and James Matheson. Both of these men, if you were talking to them in their gentlemen's club, would have insisted that they were providing a service, that they weren't creating a problem. They would have pointed to the Chinese as these people who always smoked opium, which was partially true.

Jardine, in his letters, goes as far as to say, it is the safest, most gentleman-like speculation I'm aware of. So he's actually doing a favour to the world, did he? Okay. You just see Pablo Escobar pulling that one off. It is even today the exclusive of drug pushes. I'm not creating the demand. If it wasn't me, it would be someone worse.

I mean, it literally is that. But look, I want to know who they are. Can you give us the origin stories of both men? Okay. So they're from very different backgrounds. William Jardine is born on, I think he's from Cacubri. I think he's from the west of Scotland. In 1784, he lost his father at the age of nine.

He scraped through Edinburgh's medical school. And he ends up going out to India as an East India Company doctor. and one of the perks of the job is the opportunity to develop commercial sidelines. That was true throughout the whole history of the East Indy Company. All these guys were busy trading on their own account as well as on the company. And officers were allowed to take two tons of goods for their own goods, and they didn't always use this space. So Jardine being the financially very astute Scotsman that he was, and coming from a poor ground and needing to make the money, he didn't have, family money to fall back on. He was supporting his family back home. So he begins to trade

on his own account and soon finds that opium is one of the things that he can make money out of. He's not, you know, hitting the ground running and saying, I've got two tons of an allowance. I'm going to just buy two tons of opium. I mean, this is a gradual buildup, but a pretty quick builder. Yeah, he's asking his friends. He sees that he sees that somebody down the ship has just got one trunk or, you know, can I, can I put something in there? Can I borrow some of your space? for this. So he's from a very humble background and it's three years into this business that he meets his lifelong partner. He's another Scott, but from a very different background. James Matheson is the son of the chief of Clan Matheson. And I have to say, I have distant relations of mine, my marriage.

I remember two elderly Matheson men with large mustaches and Tasson. And chest full of opium. They were both very special guardsmen. Can we stop talking about your family just for one second? Would you focus just for one second? So this James Matheson, though, he's a younger man than William Jardine. He's about 12 years younger. He is a different temperament as well to Jardine. So whereas Jardine is the medical student, who also we should say has been kind of stung by his speculating because, you know, for a man who doesn't have a backup plan, and he's the one

who's providing for his family, and he puts everything into this, it doesn't always work out because, you know, he does forfeit his entire £40 wages one time on only his second voyage, which actually speaks, you know, well of at least his fortitude, if not his aims and his trade. He loses his entire £40 wages because, you know, there's damage incurred during a typhoon in Canton. The boat goes down or it's flooded with water and he loses everything. But he, you know, even after coming out of that, he thinks, no, this is still worth it. I mean, I'll scrape together the money again. I know I've lost an absolute fortune, a crippling fortune, but I'm going to do it again.

Now, James Matheson, the younger man. And the posher man. He doesn't have that fear because he comes from means. He's got a family that will bail him out if his shenanigans don't work out. For Jardine, it's kind of life and death. He either rises or falls by this speculation. But for Matheson, it's almost, I don't know, is it fair to say, it's almost a sort of a sideline tinkering, you know, that I'm going to make my name because I can.

It may start like that. But he, I mean, both of these guys, we may not like what they do. on, but they're both super astute businessmen who make unbelievable fortunes in a difficult trade. And Matheson is tough, too. At one point, he gets a blow on the head during a kerfuffle in Canton, which we're going to deal with later in this story, whereupon he gets the Chinese nickname that translates as iron-headed old rat. That's nice. These guys were tough. They take control of an existing firm that's originally called Maniac and co.

And in 1832, they rename it as Jardine Matheson and co. And it endures to this day as a huge conglomerate. Well, it's renamed now as Jardines. It's actually, actually, poor old Mathesons, you know, relatives aren't going to be. Because Jardine is just Jardines. But if you go to the website, which I did, it is still, you know, Jardine and Matheson, but the name, there's sort of the name that everyone knows now is Jardines. I should tell a naughty story that when I went to lecture there,

I got one of the local Hong Kong taxis. And as he dropped me off, I said, is this the building? He said, yes, it's very easy to tell. It's designed so that this skyscraper, this is, you know, it's a modern high-rise building. But the windows are round to look like the port-holes of a ship as a reference to their region. Oh, really to this. And he said, sir, we call it now the building of a thousand assholes. Anyway, that's a naughty story.

I didn't see that coming. So, crucial bit of the story. So there's Jardine and the Bassam, both of them Scots, but the business really takes off when they take on board a Parsi partner with them. And this guy is not Eni-O-Parsie. This is Jamsetji-G-G-Boy, who was one of the great patrons of Bombay. To the stay, there's a JJ School of Art in Bombay, which is the cutting-edge art school in India, named after this guy.

And so you have yet again this partnership that we've found before in other stories of Scots and Parsies joining together to make money. And what's interesting is his life story echoes in some ways that of Jardine. He was orphaned at 13 and he enters the China trade trying to make his fortune. He makes a voyage to Calcutta in 1799 as an apprentice for one of his party cousins. He begins chartering ships with borrowed money. And in 1805, he meets Jardine when he takes a passage to Canton on the same company ship that Jardine is a surgeon on. And they're captured by a French frigate. So this is not an easy business.

This is the period of the Napoleonic wars. They're caught by the French. Don't feel too sorry for them. They are big drug dealers. But anyway, yes, okay. So they get captured. Are they treated badly by the French? They are abandoned by their French?

They are abandoned by their French captors at the Cape of Good Hope. And Jardine and Gigi Boy make their ways separately home in 805, but have got each other's, or they wouldn't have got each other's numbers, but they've got each other's addresses, presumably. Got each other's digits, have they? Okay, right. And this scares Gigi Boy about travelling again. He doesn't like leaving Bombay after this. But he is the financial genius doing the books and running the business out of the west of India.

He's basically senior management at this point. He's not going to get his hands dirty. He's going to be senior management. Right. And he sends his cargo under consignment to Canton, under an agent. And from the 1820s, that is always William Jardine. So my lecture, when I went to the Jardine's building,

to the building of a thousand ourselves in Hong Kong. Can I just say you're not being invited back after this? That is, for one time and one time only. William Darrymple. And I should apologise to my Madison cousins, so I hope I'm not offended by any of this. When you go to that building, the lecture room is in the penthouse at the top. You press the top button on the lift, you're whizzing up.

And you come out and there's this palatial room. Facing you larger than life size is an enormous portrait, I think by chinory, of Jamsetji Gigi Boy. What does it look like? I mean, he's this sort of big, florid, paris, slightly overweight with lots of facial hair, wearing the mogul robes that Parsis wear in the 19th century, and still their priests wear these sort of... It's like mogul caught clothes, and they have the little red hat. He's very much the businessman.

You can see what a caddy operator he is just from the portrait. But I like it that he's still there. You don't see Jardino Matheson when you walk out the lift. It's Jamset Gigi boy that's there. Right. I've seen another portrait of him not wearing the mogul clothes, by the way, if you want to look him up. I mean, it's interesting.

It's nice to see these people's faces. But he looks like a retired geography teacher, but he's wearing a very fine and expensive Western suit. He's not in that kind of mogul finery. But he is wearing that sort of. very distinctive, parsley hat still. Kane in his hand, you can see it's got an ivory carved handle. This is a man who the picture is just screaming wealth.

I am wealthy. I'm very, very rich. It's a very fetching, very striking picture. A photograph, not a portrait, a photograph of him. Anyway, as you were. So what happens next is very interesting. We said earlier that James Matheson is well connected and from a sort of posh establishment background.

He eventually goes back to London and begins lobbying parliamentarians. That's before he buys a rotten borough and enters parliament himself. Initially, he's lobbying other MPs. In his sights, he has the East India Company. This is now the 1830s, and there is a growing movement in Britain that says that this monopoly is damaging for business, that it shouldn't be a monopoly, it should be open to all. Matheson stirs this up. He commissions people to write articles. He gets people to raise it on the floor of Parliament. And he commissions, for example, an article in the Edinburgh Review in 1831, which says, the Parliament of Great Britain, have it in their power to open new and boundless markets for the products of our artisans, as they are called, to assist in forwarding the civilization of the Eastern world. I love that. That's how they talk about the opium trade. The East India Company's Monopoly, checks the spirit of improvement, paralyzes industry, and upholds ignorance and barbarism in

vast countries. Its abolition will rebound to the advantage of every man in England, the gentleman in the factory only accepted. And they get it. Within a couple of years, the East Indy Company monopoly is broken, and suddenly in the 1830s, anyone is allowed to enter this trade. And the news reaches Canton of this momentous change in 1830s. 33. Now, not only does the company not control this trade, but according to Jardine, who's one of the very first to hear about it, because he's getting the news directly from Matheson in Britain, the company will not even be allowed by the British government to continue trading in China at all. That's so interesting. What a turnaround. For the economy of the time,

this is like some Trump's tariffs. Can I also another turnaround? So in the last episode, or it might have been the one before that. We were talking about what Westerners thought of China. And, you know, Voltaire, thinkers, they all regarded China as deeply civilized, incredibly advanced. People who deserve to be our friends was the way I tried to characterize it. You know, we are the Brits. We're the best. But, you know, Chinese deserve us in their lives.

They weren't natives. They didn't describe it in the same way they described Indians or Africans or any other indigenous people. This changes with Jardine and Matheson. So can I just read you a little thing that James Matheson, who is going to be one of the most powerful men, British men in China at the time. He writes this about the Chinese. He says, the Chinese are a people characterised by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy, who nevertheless were blessed with the possession of, in his words, a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth. So you've got this enormous turnaround where the lens,

is now cracked. And it is being presented by a man who only wants to make money who doesn't care about the chinoiserie. He does not give two poops about, you know, the kind of silks or, you know, the kind of ceremony. None of that matters to him. These are now lower species of humans. And that will become the pervading attitude. It is such a gear shift and it's so stark and so different to what was being presented before. So Stephen Platt, in his wonderful book in period of Twilight, makes the breaking of the East India Company monopoly the moment when everything changes. And the reason is that according to Platt, what happens now is you get a free-for-all where any British trader, even if has absolutely no experience of China or the Chinese,

anyone that wants to make money turns up in this sort of opium rush in China. And of course, it's not these guys who are actually distributing the opium. They are all in a Hoc to Chinese gangsters. Right. And so as with the modern drug trade in Europe or in America, where you have illegal drugs, you've got gangsters selling it with violence, with gangs, with all the paraphernalia of illicit trade. So not only is unlimited quantities of opium now coming in as everyone tries to sell it,

the company had at least kept vaguely to, you know, a set of agreed rules in order to maintain the trade on a sort of equilibrium. Now it's a free-for-all. They were civilised drug dealers. They were relative, certainly, to what comes now. And so this whole world of private traders like Jardine and Matheson and Gigi Boy become more and more inhock to the world of Chinese gangsters. And what happens is that the clippers, they design these extra fast. opium vessels called opium clippers, which are designed specifically as the sort of porches of of the maritime world so that they can outrun any of the Chinese junks.

Can I talk about one of them? I mean, just because I like the idea of the boats that take them. So, I mean, you talked about crabs, first of all, that used to do the bringing over. So these are fast crabs, which are heavily armed. You know, if you've got government vessels pulling up alongside, you want a fast crab on your side because they will just shoot. They have the ability to fire when approach. But you also have, I love this, the long, slim Chinese smuggling boats, which are the centipedes or fast crabs, depending on who you talk to.

Scambling dragons, they're also. Scambling dragons is so much better than fast crab. Centipede I like very much. But these are the ones that have opium loaded on them because they are swift and they can make quick getaways. And they're called centipedes because they've got rows of 70 oarsmen. and these guys are... Little legs going like crazy.

Yeah. So, you know, you can see how when you have private interest involved, you have, I mean, in a way, sad, isn't it? But it's true. Private investment leads to innovation. So you've got suddenly, you know, whereas these old clunky things were bringing opium over it.

Now they are faster, they are quicker, and they're better armed to do it. So this is the run. The Clippers from Bombay, Karachi and Calcutta sail up as far as Lin-Tin, which is this sort of almost deserted island, about a third of the way between Hong Kong and Canton. There they liaise with the scrambling dragons and the fast crabs, and the opium is shunted from the East India Company clipper out of sight into these Chinese vessels, and off they go into the Chinese interior. And as well as the violence,

of the gangs who run these scrambling dragons, as again with modern America, the corruption of the officials who are paid to turn a blind eye to let this stuff in. So there's a whole ecosystem that's gaining by this. It isn't just the private traders like Jardine Matheson and Gigi Boy. It's a supply line economics theory is what it is. And so all sorts of people are in on this from the local officials who are being paid off not to do it. Because it's still illegal. It's totally legal. It's totally illegal. It's not allowed to happen. The Chinese have said no to opium. Just saying no, they've been just saying no for a very long time, even though some of them are hypocrites and some of the very rich ones have been taking this stuff for quite a long time.

But while they've been saying it, they also are, you know, taking backhanders. And according to one British dealer who testifies to a government committee, and this is in the parliamentary report in 1830. Every now and then, there is a very strong Egypt from the Chinese against the trade, but, like other Chinese edicts, it is nearly powerless. It imposes a little difficulty, perhaps for the moment, and enables the mandarins to extort more from the dealers. I'm sure. Corruption. Everywhere there's lots of money, there is corruption. But there is also, I would only just temper this with the different view of now the Chinese. Now the view is they are corruptible and stupid and obstinate. But the legal status of opium, and I keep stressing this,

what Britain is doing and what it has unleashed and what it was doing under the East India Company and what it is now allowed as a growth industry with all its supply line benefits is illegal. It is illegal drug stealing in a country that says it doesn't want these drugs. On one hand, you've got China being corrupted, being turned over to violence. That's even before you start the whole business of great swathes of the population, just lying on their back, smoking opium rather than doing productive work. But while all this is happening, Jardine and Matheson, who we met, and these two, while China is falling apart, are genuinely rising up the social system in Britain. And just to look ahead of what happens to them, because it's interesting to compare it to the collapse in China.

Jardine returns to London. He becomes the military advisor on China to Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary. He then ends up in the House of Commons, just like Clive had done before him. him. I mean, there are many people who take a very dim view of him, and one of the most amusing sort of scurrilous portraits of him is by Disraeli, no less, in his novel Sybil. And he says, one of the characters in Sybil says, oh, dreadful man, a Scotchman richer than Cresis, one Mr. Druggy. This is in 1850s, this is written, one Mr. Druggie, fresh from Canton with a million in opium in each pocket denouncing corruption and bellowing free trade. And when he dies, his seat passes to

guess who? Matheson. Matheson takes out the same seat. In the end, retires from the trade, and he buys the Hebrideon Isle of Lewis for half a million pounds and reinvents himself as a laird doing good works. So on one hand, you've got the sort of growing collapse of China. Another hand, you've got these guys reinventing themselves completely and becoming most. respectable. Why do drug oligarchs always buy islands? I was like, it's a thing, isn't it? It's a story as old as time. What do you do with all the money from your ill-gotten gains? Buy an island? Didn't Escobar also buy a zoo and fill it with hippos? Now there's all these terrible hippos in Colombia. I don't think there are any hippos on the Isle of Lewis.

We're coming to an end of this episode, but we've painted a picture for you of in two generations. you've had this almost complete turnaround of attitude of the British towards the Chinese, but also of the Chinese's ability to police their own country, if you like. If you've let private enterprise in, you've not just got one spear point to deal with. You've got a step by a thousand pricks. You've got all of these. And I say the word pricks at twice. Very good.

But what happens that changes all this free-for-all? And this is the crucial thing. is not only is it addiction, gangs, violence and corruption. There's one other thing that's happening is that finally China, which had been the massive drain of European silver and gold for the previous 50 years, now suddenly the silver is disappearing. And remember all this is happening in Canton, miles from the capital in Beijing, but the disappearance of silver is noted in the course. The emperor can't see the fast crabs.

And obviously the officials are not reporting that they are taking backhanders. And they're far too polite to tell him what's happening. But he notices the drain of silver. Silver begins to disappear. It goes up in price. It becomes much rarer. And he starts investigating and realizes that things have reached a pitch where he has to intervene. And so he calls for his best man.

there is one man who's renowned in the Chinese civil service of the day as the most able and honest of all the civil servants. And this is Commissioner Lin. We're going to hear more about the incredibly effective Commissioner Lynn in the next episode. He's such an interesting character. So yeah, can't wait for that one. Actually, if you can't wait, because I know some of you can't, the best way to deal with that itch that needs a scratch and is to join the club. EmpirePodUK.com. EmpirePoduk.com, then you don't have to wait for our regular release times.

You just go, I want it all and I want it now on a fast crab. Bring me my next episode. And that's what will happen if you're a member of the club. So Empirepoduk.com. Otherwise, we're going to be back at the well-appointed time that we're meant to be back till the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnins. And goodbye from me, William, Zerunple.