An Insignificant Barbarian From A Small Country
James Flint corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and enraged the Qianlong Emperor. And yes, there is a soybean connection. The soybean is everything, part III.
In the summer of 1759, the British East India Company trading ship Success sailed up the eastern coast of China, making its way to the port of Ningbo. On board were a seaman named Samuel Bowen, who had arrived in China the previous year, and James Flint, a Chinese-speaking agent for the East India Company (EIC) who had been active in the region for decades.
The two men shared passage for little more than a month, but struck up a profound connection; Bowen later gave the middle name Flint to both his sons. The particularities of their relationship are hard to parse from a distance, but one thing seems certain: both men were fascinated by soybeans. In 1767, when Bowen was farming soybeans in pre-revolutionary war Georgia -- likely the first person to ever do so in North America -- the journal Gentleman’s Magazine reported that while in China Bowen and Flint had discovered that the soybean had potent anti-scurvy properties and that this “was a principal reason for... introducing them into America, as it would be a most valuable remedy to prevent or cure the scurvy amongst the seamen on board his majesty’s ships.”
One soybean scholar suggests that Flint might have been an investor in Bowen’s scheme to export soy sauce from the colonies back to the United Kingdom. As for Flint, his familiarity with the soybean was well-known enough in the late 18th century that Benjamin Franklin wrote him a letter inquiring as to the particulars of tofu manufacture. Flint was happy to respond.
Dear Sir,
The method the Chinese convert Gallivances [soybeans] into Towfu. They first steep the Grain in warm water for ten or twelve Hours to soften a little, that it may grind easily...
(James Flint to Benjamin Franklin, January 1770)
Bowen’s soybean dreams failed to take root. Commercial farming of soybeans did not gain real traction in the United States until the 20th century. But today, the United States is the largest producer of soybeans -- one of the world’s most traded and agriculturally significant commodities -- on the planet. There is simply no way to tell the story of the soybean’s exquisite embodiment of the intersecting forces of capitalism, globalization, technology, and agriculture without considering the moment James Flint and Samuel Bowen, two Englishmen on the make in the Far East, met on the Success.
---
“Hung-jen [James Flint] has been going back and forth to trade in China for years. He understands Chinese and is well acquainted with the situation. He is tricky and deceitful.”
Li Shiyao, Governor General, Liangguang, in a letter to the imperial court dated August 1759. (From James Flint Versus the Canton Interest, by Edward Farmer)
I first encountered James Flint via the soybean chronicles of the legendary William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi. Then I learned some additional, non-soy related facts about him.
1. He was the first Englishman to work as a Chinese interpreter for the British East India Company.
2. His mission, on board the Success, had nothing to do with soybeans and everything to do with the East India Company’s desire to open up a second port for British trade, and thus escape the extortions and constraints inflicted on them in the southern port of Canton, where a small cabal of Chinese merchants enjoyed near-monopoly control of foreign business.
3. Flint’s proficiency in Chinese managed to gain him the direct attention of the mighty Qianlong emperor, who consequently beheaded an alleged Chinese collaborator of Flint, jailed Flint in Macao for three years, and then banished him from China for life.
4. The so-called “Flint Affair” “resulted in the fact that, until 1842, [as far as foreign trade was concerned] all power was virtually in Chinese hands, with the movements of Westerners heavily restricted, contact with the local population was prohibited except through officially appointed mediators, and an official position of inferiority was accepted by Western traders for the sake of economic profit.” 1842, incidentally, was the year the first Opium War ended.
5. In his edict banishing Flint, Qianlong called him “an insignificant barbarian from a small country” and posed the question: “the products of China are abundant; what need have [we] for the small and insignificant goods of distant barbarians?” -- language extraordinarily similar to that used by Qianlong 34 years later in his much more famous letter to King George III, in which he responded with great negativity to the overtures of the Macartney Embassy in 1793.
---
“It well may be that in the best of all possible worlds -- the one that antedates our Babelian hubris -- all humans were able to communicate with all other humans, and the function of translators quite literally was unthinkable. But here we are in a world whose shrinking store of languages still comes to several thousand, a world where both isolationism and rampaging nationalism are on the rise and countries have begun to erect actual as well as metaphorical walls around themselves. I do not believe I am overstating the case if I say that translation can be, for readers as well as writers, one of the ways past a menacing babble of incomprehensible tongues and closed frontiers into the possibility of mutual comprehension. It is not a possibility we can safely turn our backs on.”
Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters
So what are we to make of the fact that one of the very first Englishmen to become fluent in Chinese was instrumental in setting two great empires on a path towards disastrous collision, with fallout that remains painfully relevant context for the super-power saber-rattling between the U.S. and China today? This is personally distressing, because I have always been in Edith Grossman’s camp. “The possibility of mutual comprehension” is what drives me to study Chinese and engage in quixotic endeavors like my current nightly homework reading a Chinese biography of a Sichuanese pig-feed billionaire.
But a close look at the “Flint Affair” reveals that Flint’s mastery of Chinese is exactly what put his own life in mortal danger. And while it is undoubtedly true that the act of learning a language builds a connection between the translator and an alien culture, it’s not at all clear that interpretation works as some kind of anti-hostility palliative between opposed interests. Sometimes, as Henrietta Harrison documents in her fascinating The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire, the act of interpreting creates conflict. Sometimes, great nations take great pains not to understand one another.
Next: 1736: a teenage James Flint arrives in Canton to learn Chinese.