22“Opium threatened public order and
wreaked havoc in the economy”
T
he man charged with
enacting the emperor’s
decree was Lin Zexu,
a legendarily incorruptible
minister of the Qing
dynasty. Lin was one of his country’s
strongest critics of opium – indeed, a
statue of him now stands in New York
City’s Chinatown, bearing a plaque
reading: ‘Pioneer in the War against
Drugs’. In 1837 he had orchestrated a
local suppression campaign in central
China that greatly impressed the
Daoguang Emperor, so in 1838 he
named Lin an imperial commissioner,
authorised to act in the emperor’s name.
Lin was sent to the southern port of
Canton, where the British conducted
their trade, to put an end to the opium
problem for good.
When Lin arrived in Canton in
early 1839, he got straight to work.
He quickly arrested Chinese drug
dealers and corrupt officials, and
plastered the city with proclamations
demanding that users surrender their
smoking equipment to be destroyed.
Judging that the British bore at least as
much blame for China’s opium problem
as the domestic scofflaws did, Lin also
issued orders that all British merchants
must immediately surrender their
opium stocks for destruction.
As Lin saw it, this was a simple and
clear-cut moral campaign. Opium
threatened China’s public order and
corrupted everyone who came into
contact with it. The smuggling trade
was wreaking havoc in the economy.
There was simply no possible
justification for allowing the trade to
continue. At the height of his campaign
against opium, Lin wrote a letter to
Queen Victoria in which he chastisedher for letting her subjects sell the drug
in China. Everything the Chinese sold
to the British, he told her, was beneficial- tea, silk, pottery and so on. “By what
principle of reason, then,” he asked the
queen, “should these foreigners send in
return a poisonous drug, which involves
in destruction those very natives of
China?” Though there is no evidence
that Queen Victoria ever read the letter,
a copy was brought home by a British
merchant, printed in The Times
newspaper in the summer of 1840,
and became famous among western
critics of the opium trade.
Demanding destruction
Since 1760, the British had been
confined to trading at just one port
in the empire’s far south, Canton, in
order to keep them confined and to
restrict their contact with ordinary
Chinese people. Even there, they
weren’t allowed into the city proper
(which, in the early 19th century, was
the third-largest in the world) but rather
had to make do with a small trading
compound encompassing under five
hectares at the edge of a river outside
Canton’s city walls.
Lin Zexu had never before interacted
with foreigners, and he held the British
in rather low esteem – as did the
emperor. Perhaps because of his poor
opinion of the British, Lin expected
quick acquiescence to his demands –
but at first nothing happened. After his
orders were delivered requiring that the
British hand over their opium, they did
not produce anything.
In fact, the opium itself was not
actually in Canton but on ships that
the merchants had scattered to distant
ports, so there was no way for Lin toforcibly seize their drugs. Furious at the
merchants’ refusal to heed his orders, he
took a further step, announcing that
none of the British could leave Canton
until all of their opium was surrendered.
He removed all Chinese servants and
employees from the foreign trading
compound, and surrounded it with a
cordon of soldiers.
That seemed to do the trick. Within
a couple of days, Charles Elliot – chief
superintendent of British trade in China- intervened, and arranged for the mer-
chants to hand over all of their opium to
Lin Zexu. It took six weeks to gather all
stocks of the drug – the ships carrying
it had to be called back from locations
as far away as Singapore and Manila.
Once assembled, it comprised a fantastic
amount: 20,283 chests containing more
than 1300 tonnes of the raw drug.
Over the course of three weeks in
June 1839, Lin Zexu made a grand
show of destroying all of the opium
and flushing it out to sea. As he saw
it, his moral campaign at Canton had
clearly triumphed. The merchants had
caved in to his demands and surren-
dered more opium than he could
possibly have expected.
With the destruction of the opium,
Lin considered the matter to be settled.
He reported to the emperor that the
British merchants were now chastened.
No one had resisted. When confronted
with the emperor’s authority, “naturally
they were cowed into submission”. In
addition, to show sympathy for the Brit-
ish opium dealers who had surrendered
all of their capital, he recommended
that the emperor show benevolence by
giving them a small gift of tea to make
up for their losses. That, he felt,
would mark the end of the episode. 5
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