East Sails West: The Voyage of the Keying, 1846–1855

1. Origins, Purchase and Commissioning

The Junk and the Project The Keying was a large, sea-going junk, somewhere between fifty and possibly one hundred years old, that was illegally purchased in China in 1846 and smuggled out to Hong Kong. There the ship was prepared for its voyage. Its crew was completed. It gained the valediction of Hong Kong’s official good and great. It set out and, eventually, after much vicissitude, completed its intended voyage. It failed to achieve the business success intended, at least for more than a few years. It was sold and its crew dispersed. Towed to Liverpool for a forlorn and failed last hurrah, it fades from the record in circumstances still far from clear. That is a bald narrative; for the last nearly 170 years its terse summary represents almost all there was thought worth knowing. As we shall see, however, there was far more to it that, teased out of the traces that remain, tells us not only about the Keying, but about the world in which her drama played out. The enterprise was undertaken by a group of Hong Kong investors. Their object was to sail the vessel on its own bottom from Hong Kong to London, where it would be put on public display and, presumably, earn the investors a handsome return. For excise and possibly other regulatory reasons, the ship sailed without a cargo,1 but was equipped instead with a small ‘collection’ of Chinese artefacts that would be displayed on the ship upon arrival, while the Chinese crew doubled as performers and musicians. The voyage of the Keying was therefore a promotional trip. It was possibly intended to cash in on enthusiasm in London for ‘things Chinese’, fomented by Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Museum, featuring ‘Ten thousand Chinese things’2 that had been all the rage Chapter 1 Origins, Purchase and Commissioning 30 East Sails West just two years previously. However, the promoters of the Keying’s voyage would appear to have intended a very different ‘spin’ on things Chinese to the respectful and admiring tone of Dunn’s exhibition.3 Dunn’s museum had been moved to London in 1842, and was on display in a specially built enclosure, 225 feet long and 50 feet wide at St. George’s Place, Hyde Park Corner, for two years thereafter. The wonderfully titled catalogue by William Langdon, Ten Thousand Things Relating to China and the Chinese: An Epitome of the Genius, Government, History, Literature, Agriculture, Arts, Trade, Manners, Customs, and Social Life of the People of the Celestial Empire, Together with a Synopsis of the Chinese Collection,4 gives an insight into the show the Keying’s promoters could hardly be supposed to have hoped they could surpass. One can only surmise the intention was to ride on Dunn’s coat-tails while conveying a rather different message. Nathan Dunn, a Quaker from Philadelphia who had spent thirteen years in Canton (Guangzhou) as a trader, had strong views on the opium trade and opposed the war fought by the British in furtherance of it in 1839–42.5 Certainly, the catalogue’s preface by Langdon, despite its evangelical zeal for the Christianization of China, makes a very strong case for the reader—and the visitor to the collection—to learn the correct lesson: that of a great and admirable civilization much of profit can be learned. There was a clear message that the more benighted contemporary portrayals of China in the popular media, emphasizing a backward and stagnant condition, gave a greatly distorted view. Langdon does not hide from the contrasts between the fast industrializing Western world and the pre-industrial world of China, but the lesson he draws is not to China’s discredit, as was so much contemporary writing in service of justifying the Opium War. More to the point, the catalogue ends, in its final essay, ‘Foreign Intercourse with China’,6 with a ringing denunciation of the opium trade: The Chinese have been, repeatedly, denounced in terms savouring little of Christian forbearance and charity. In their business transactions, they have been presented to our imagination as a nation of cheats; in their bearing towards foreigners, as scornful and repulsive to the last degree of supercilious self-complacency; and in their own social relations, as bereft of every noble sentiment and generous sympathy. . . . If European and American traders may justly blame the illiberality of the Chinese, these have certainly just ground of complaint against them in the illegal practices to which their...