20By the 1830s, opium was causing severe social and economic problems
in China – but when the emperor targeted the trade in 1838, the British
responded in a surprising way. Stephen Platt traces the events that led
to the First Opium War and the beginning of the end of imperial China
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
China’s crackdown on
opium provokes Britain
By the 19th century, opium smoking
had become a major problem in
China. Use – and, correspondingly,
supply – of the drug had expanded
rapidly over the previous century,
despite efforts by various rulers
to quash the trade. From 1773,
most opium in China was imported
by British traders, and by 1838
some 40,000 chests – around 2,500
tonnes – were arriving in Chinese
ports each year. The Daoguang
Emperor decided it was time to act.The opium trade in China had long
been illegal, though enforcement of
that law was negligible. Trafficking was
largely conducted by British and Indian
smugglers who carried the drug to
China’s coast; Chinese criminal guilds
and corrupt officials then handled inland
commerce. It was a cosy and profitabletrade for those involved, and enormous
fortunes were made on both sides – at
the expense of the addicts in China,
of course. If one could ignore those
unfortunates – and most British did –
it might seem, as the Scottish opium
baron William Jardine wrote in 1830,
“the safest, and most Gentlemanlike
speculation that I am aware of ”.
No one profited more from this trade
than the East India Company, which
produced opium on a vast scale in Bengal
for sale to China by middlemen such as
Jardine. By the late 1830s, opium had
eclipsed all other exports from India, and
it seemed to many that the economy of
British India could not survive without
it. Opium also effectively paid for all of
the tea the British bought from China.
That tea was subject to a heavy tax back
home, so the British government had an
indirect stake in the traffic, too.China’s emperor had long opposed
opium on moral grounds, but the final
straw in his decision to suppress it was
that the trade appeared to be draining
China of its silver supply. As Chinese
silver flowed into the coffers of foreign
drug dealers, the metal became more
scarce in China and thus more
expensive. This caused a crisis, because
taxes were assessed in fixed quotas of
silver, which peasants had to pay by
converting their small-denomination
copper currency into silver at market
rates. As silver’s value went up, their taxes
effectively rose as well – in some places
by 70% or more. China’s
economy spiralled into
a depression, and
in 1838 fear of
widespread social
unrest finally drove
the emperor to act.WELLCOME COLLECTIONONE MOMENT, TWO VIEWPOINTS
Over the following
pages we explore
Chinese and British
views of the
incident...5
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