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We might have been permitted to quadruple our supply of opium to his subjects, if we would have been content to be paid, not in bullion, but by taking Chinese goods in exchange; in a word, to change the basis of our dealings from sale to barter; and all this from a totally groundless notion of the Emperor and his advisers, that we were draining his kingdom of silver in their own words, "causing the Sycee silver to ooze out of the dominions of the Brother of the Sun and the Moon."
It must end so, that this opium trade will be the ruin of China, for in its use it not only enervates the people, but it is procured by draining the country of the precious metals, and it may be fairly stated, that for every ounce of opium brought into the country, nearly its weight in Sycee silver has been extracted.
It was all dead quiet, silent like some deserted graveyard. The sailors and the priests and their converts, remembering that Heaven helps those who help themselves, had sallied out and were reprovisioning themselves and making good their losses. Indeed, the only men we could find were some converts engaged in stacking up silver shoes, or sycee, in a secluded quadrangle.
It was brought to us by the smuggling-boats, and thrown on board, very much as the opium was taken out, and we stowed it away in the hold. All this was done in the day-time, but I never heard of any one's following the article into the ship. Once there, it appeared to be considered safe. Then we got sycee silver, which was prohibited for exportation. All came on board in the same manner.
There was a tiresome string of cash with a rattan twisted through their square holes; silver customs taels, and mace and candareen; Chinese gold leaf and Fukien dollars; coins from Cochin China in the shape of India ink, with raised edges and characters; old Carolus hooked dollars; Sycee silver ingots, smooth and flat above, but roughly oval on the lower surface, not unlike shoes; Japanese obangs, their gold stamped and beaten out almost as broad as a hand's palm; mohurs and pieces from Singapore; Dutch guilders from Java; and the small silver and gold drops of Siam called tical.
I really cannot see the force of the noble earl's argument with respect to the illegality of the trade, when it is as clear as possible that its existence was well known to the government of China, and that no step had ever been taken to put it down; but, on the contrary, the means of continuing it, and of raising a larger duty upon it, were under consideration; and, in fact, the trade was finally put down, and discontinued only because it was supposed that it occasioned the export of a larger quantity of native or Sycee silver.
At Kiukiang, where the vessel stopped, the lowdah and his men went ashore after receiving the gold dust and sycee shoes as their share of the plunder, while Wang, taking the junk and cargo as his portion, shipped a fresh crew and sailed on to Hankow, where he set up in business with the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains.
Lay said, 'Come to the ship and we will give you Sycee instead. 'See how just they are, said a man in the crowd to his neighbour; 'they do not force their coin upon him. This kind of ready recognition of moral worth is quite Chinese, and nothing will convince me that a people who have this quality so marked are to be managed only by brutality and violence.
The Bourgeois Philibert had exported largely to China the newly discovered ginseng, for which at first the people of the flowery kingdom paid, in their sycee silver, ounce for ounce. And his Cantonese correspondent esteemed himself doubly fortunate when he was enabled to export his choicest teas to New France in exchange for the precious root.
Even the "melting-houses," where sycee was "standardized" for provincial use, were the joint enterprises of officials and merchants; bargaining governing every transaction; and only when a violent break occurred in the machinery, owing to famine or rebellion, did any other force than money intervene.
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