Beginning in 1757, all Western maritime commercial activity in China was confined by the Qing Dynasty to the single port of Guangzhou (in English, Canton). Guangzhou is a river port, lying about eighty miles up the Pearl River from the sea. In antiquity, when it was already an important port, it had actually been located on the ocean, but in late imperial times (particularly after the fourteenth century) the bay had silted up, creating today’s Pearl River delta.10 The restriction of European shipping to only one port was not some ancient Chinese tradition but a new policy – an application of imperial border control policies that had recently proved successful against the nomads of the northwest.11 The policy also did not apply to the Russians, who could travel overland to Beijing, nor to Chinese merchants themselves, who came and went relatively freely. But Western shipping was limited to Guangzhou, where a number of Chinese firms joined to form a monopolistic association (called the Co-hong by the English) that handled every aspect of contact with the Western merchants.
Most prominent, now, among those Western merchants were the British, who had developed a considerable appetite for a Chinese product called tea, which they were beginning to purchase in substantial quantities. Even in Guangzhou, Westerners were not allowed inside the city walls. They were confined, instead, during the six-month trading season, to a cluster of so-called factories southwest of the city walls near the Pearl River. More permanent foreign residences were downriver in Portuguese Macao. Repeated British efforts to renegotiate these restricted terms of trade, most famously during the mission led by Lord George Macartney in 1793, were simply rebuffed by Beijing.
Although Western merchants sold many different products in exchange for Chinese tea, silk, porcelain, and lacquerware, only rarely could they sell enough to balance the exchange. The deficit, or trade imbalance, had to be made up with payments in cash (which, in China, meant silver). One contemporary American, for example, estimated that between 1805 and 1825, a net sixty-two million U.S. dollars in cash was transferred from the United States to China.12 Western merchants were naturally, therefore, interested in finding a product that they could market successfully in China, and in the late 1700s, they finally did: opium.13
Opium is a narcotic drug produced from the sap of a flower called the poppy. Opium had long been a familiar substance throughout the Old World. It may have even been grown in ancient Egypt. What was new was the technique of smoking opium, which appears to have begun as a spin-off from the practice of smoking New World tobacco. Although opium smoking may have started simply by mixing tobacco and opium together, ultimately, instead of actually setting the opium alight and directly inhaling the smoke, the technique became to apply heat to a bead of opium in a special pipe until it vaporized and then inhale the vapor. Opium smoking became especially widespread in China, but the Chinese government also took a global lead in outlawing the practice, banning nonmedicinal use of opium by as early as 1729. Elsewhere in the world, opium use was far from universally illegal prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, nineteenth-century British mothers not uncommonly dosed their own children with a liquid tincture of opium called laudanum.
Initially, there was not very much opium in China. Only two hundred chests were imported in 1729, and domestic cultivation was minimal. In 1770, however, a famine in Bengal, in northeastern India, caused the EIC to petition Parliament for assistance, resulting in the Tea Act of 1773, which allowed the EIC to sell its products tax-free in the British colonies. This provoked some irate colonists in Boston, Massachusetts, to react angrily by dumping EIC tea into the ocean – the so-called Boston Tea Party – in December 1773. Also in 1773, and as a result of that same Indian famine, the EIC gained a monopoly on the sale and production of opium in Bengal. This opium was shaped into balls bearing the EIC seal and marketed in China. During the decade 1780–1790, imports of Indian opium into China quadrupled, and by the early nineteenth century, opium is said to have become the most valuable commercial crop in the world.
The obvious problem with this lucrative opium trade was that it was illegal in China, although it was not illegal elsewhere. In a concession to Chinese government pressure, therefore, in 1800, the EIC agreed to stop selling opium in China. This made little difference, however, because the EIC continued to grow and manufacture opium in India, where it was perfectly legal, and auction the opium off to private firms, who then shipped it to China. The EIC’s British monopoly on trade with the Far East applied only to trade between Asia and Britain and never to trade between different ports within Asia. Opium imports into China therefore continued unabated.
Then, in 1834, the EIC British monopoly expired and was not renewed. Like most other contemporary European countries, early modern Britain had favored policies of mercantilism, or protected trade, but in the early nineteenth century a new ideal of free trade was taking hold. In 1776, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, coined his famous phrase about the “invisible hand,” suggesting that the free exchange of goods through market forces was the most efficient means of organizing an economy. In 1817, David Ricardo further developed the idea of comparative advantage, using the example of Portuguese specialization in wine production, which could then be exchanged for English cloth to mutual profit. Nineteenth-century British “classical” economists came to believe that government interference with the operation of market forces was likely to do more harm than good and advocated a laissez-faire approach and free trade. The inherent intellectual persuasiveness of this argument was underwritten by the rapidly increasing productivity of British industry – by 1840, Britain enjoyed about one-third of the world’s total international trade – and Britain now moved decisively toward a goal of free trade.
The expiration of the EIC monopoly on British trade with China in 1834 was a step in this direction, and it brought increased British trade – but, correspondingly, also increased sales of opium. Between 1830 and 1836, the annual number of chests of (British-controlled) Indian opium imported into China increased from 18,956 to 30,302. Because the balance of trade had now shifted against China, and silver was now pouring out to pay for opium imports, Beijing perceived a mounting economic as well as a criminal and moral crisis. Although a number of proposals were considered, Beijing resolved to crack down and end the illegal drug trade. In 1839, a special imperial commissioner named Lin Zexu (1785–1850) was sent to Guangzhou to eliminate opium smuggling.
Lin arrived in March, and by July he had arrested some seventeen hundred Chinese involved in the drug trade and confiscated seventy thousand opium pipes. Smugglers found it almost impossible to sell opium at any price. But Lin was not content with this and surrounded the Western factories, demanding that they surrender all of their opium supplies. The highest-ranking official in the Western community in Guangzhou, the British Superintendent of Trade, was placed in an awkward position because his authority over the private businessmen was limited. He also could hardly wait for instructions from London because, at that time, it still took six months before he could expect a reply. On his own initiative, therefore, he promised the merchants that the British government would reimburse them for any opium confiscated by the Chinese. With that encouragement, the foreign merchants turned over twenty-one thousand chests, or two and a half million pounds, of opium to Commissioner Lin, who had it carefully dissolved in specially dug trenches.
Because the British home government proved unwilling, in the end, to pay for the confiscated opium, the huge financial loss involved then became an issue. In addition, Commissioner Lin was not satisfied with merely confiscating the existing opium supplies and also demanded that any foreign merchant wishing to do business in China must sign an oath, on penalty of death, never to bring opium into China again. The British, as a group, refused to sign, arguing that it would subject British citizens to what they viewed as a barbaric Chinese criminal justice system, exposing them to possible extortion and the probability of torture and execution if accused, whether falsely or not. Before long, shots were fired, and in early 1840, a British fleet arrived to enforce British interests. China and Great Britain went to war.
The Qing Dynasty had no real oceangoing navy at all, whereas Britain had the most powerful navy in the world. The British fleet also already included a pioneering iron steam warship called the Nemesis. The war at sea was therefore entirely one- sided. On land, however, there were not enough British troops to have much impact on the huge Chinese Empire. Eventually, the British fleet managed to sail up the Yangzi River and cut the Grand Canal, which transported vital tax grain from the south to the capital at Beijing in the north. The Qing Dynasty was then compelled to agree to terms, signing the Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) in August 1842. This treaty opened five ports to British trade (including Shanghai, which at the time was still a relatively modest-sized city with a population of only a couple hundred thousand) and gave the island of Hong Kong permanently to Great Britain (it was the surrounding New Territories that were merely leased, for a term of ninety-nine years beginning in 1898, the expiration of which triggered the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997), and the Qing Dynasty also agreed to pay reparations amounting to some twenty-one million dollars.
After the war, opium remained illegal in China, while the volume of legal British sales in China remained disappointing. As Britain industrialized, British manufacturers entertained visions of China as the largest potential market in the world, but such hopes were never fully realized. At the end of the nineteenth century, China was still importing fewer manufactured goods from Britain than from the Netherlands.14 Although the reasons for this are complicated, British “old China hands” were inclined to blame their frustration on continuing unfair Chinese trade restrictions. At least initially, moreover, this was not entirely without reason. The British were still not actually being allowed inside the city of Guangzhou, there were still only five ports open to British trade, and taxes on British imports were collected erratically. British merchants therefore pressured their government to take more vigorous steps to pry open the tantalizingly vast China market.
An opportunity arrived in October 1856, when Chinese authorities at Guangzhou arrested some crewmembers of a ship called the Arrow. The owner of the ship was Chinese, the arrested crewmen were also “natives,” and her Hong Kong British registration had technically expired eleven days previously, but the ship’s master was British, and it was the British flag that was allegedly hauled down. The British governor of Hong Kong used this occasion to press further demands for the opening of China. The result was a second Opium War, in which Britain was this time joined by France – provoked to war by the execution of a French Christian missionary. The prosecution of this second war was delayed by the eruption of the bloody Sepoy Mutiny in India (1857–1858), but eventually, in 1860, a large British and French army landed on the northern coast near Beijing, the Chinese coastal defenses were stormed, and British and French troops marched into Beijing. The imperial Summer Palace in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing was burned and looted, and the emperor fled to Manchuria, where he died the next year. A five-year-old boy, known as the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862–1874), ascended the throne of a dynasty that appeared on the verge of collapse.
Notes
10. R. B. Marks, China: Its Environment and History (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), pp. 156–161.
11. P. C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 552–555.
12. A. P. Dudden, The American Pacific: From the Old China Trade to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 5–6.
13. See P. W. Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the War by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
14. F. Welsh, A Borrowed Place: The History of Hong Kong (New York: Kodansha International, 1993), pp. 310, 318–319.
Written by Charles Holcombe in "A History of East Asia , From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century", Cambridge University Press, UK, 2017, excerps chapter 8. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.