Page 333 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

319.

Although before 1839 the American missionaries,

through the Chinese Repository, had consistently advocated

ending the opium trade, they had nevertheless tacitly parti­

cipated in it. The vessels aboard which they sailed along

the China coast to distribute religious tracts usually were

opium-clippers, and the Chinese who took their proffered

tracts were most often opium-dealers. Edwin Stevens acknow­

ledged in his reports of his voyages that the missionaries•

52
.
primary C h' inese con ac s n th e coas were opium- ea ers.
t t o
d 1
·
t
By 1839 the missionaries could not see any tangible results
stemming from their dispersed material. At the time they made
the voyages though, opium-clippers transacting business on the

coast provided the only channel of reaching Chinese natives

outside Canton.
1
Tnroughout the 1830 s the American missionaries voiced

general condemnation of the opium trade. Their position was

singular within the foreign community. With the exception of

Olyphant & Co., which refrained from publicly denouncing the

trade although refusing to participate, the foreign mercantile
53
community at Canton approved the opium trade. For the mer­

chants, including the Americans, opium signified little more

52
Letter, E. Stevens to American Board of Commissioners,
Jun. 1835, in Missionu.ry Herald, )C{XII, 2 (February 1836), 58.
53
As late as 1838 Olyphant & Co. refused to take a
public stand against the opium trade. The house preferred,
by its own admission, merely to abstain from participating in
it. Letter from Olyphant & Co. to the Editor, Canton Register,
XI, 34 (Aug. 21, 1838).