24C
harles Elliot, however, saw
things differently. The lone
British official in China,
Elliot held an ambiguous
position – chief superinten-
dent of trade – that made him responsible
for the British merchants without giving
him any actual power over them. To his
credit, he was no admirer of the opium
trade, which he considered immoral and
disgraceful, though he also acknowl-
edged (with regret) how important it
was to the economy of the empire.
The opium trade was a dirty secret
from which the British government
tried to distance itself. Lord Palmerston,
the foreign secretary, had given Elliot
clear instructions that any British peo-
ple who got into trouble for violating
China’s laws (meaning opium dealers)
should suffer the consequences and
would receive no support from home.
If a level-headed superintendent had
followed those instructions, Lin Zexu’s
crackdown in 1839 would have entailed
a relatively small number of British
opium dealers losing their wares (and
perhaps going bankrupt), but that
would have been the end of the matter.
But Elliot was not an entirely
level-headed man. Nervous and highly
strung, he was given to occasionally
impulsive actions that one merchant
described as “Elliot’s mad freaks”. He
had spent much of his time in China
worrying about the possibility of a vio-
lent collision between the opium dealers
and the Chinese government – and
was fearful that he, as superintendent,
would somehow be blamed for it. When
Lin Zexu imposed his lockdown of the
foreign compound in Canton, Elliot
panicked. The collision he feared, it
seemed, was finally happening.The merchants themselves were
phlegmatic. They had previously
weathered threats from officials that
never turned into anything serious;
after all, the trade at Canton was just as
important to China as it was to Britain,
and nobody wanted to see it interrupted
for long, so they weren’t concerned for
their own safety. Elliot, however, got it
into his head that if they did not follow
Lin’s orders immediately, the Chinese
would start chopping off the traders’
heads. Envisioning the slaughter of the
entire British population at Canton on
his watch, Elliot felt he had to make the
merchants comply – but he had no pow-
er over them, so how could he do that?
Elliot’s bizarre solution – for which
he had absolutely no authorisation – was
to buy all of their opium on behalf of the
British government. The dealers knew
that the drug market in China might
never recover, and that their opium
might be unsellable in the future – and
suddenly Charles Elliot was offering
to buy it all at full price. They quickly
got him to sign notes promising British
government payment for the entire
season’s worth of opium – those 20,283
chests, valued at £2,000,000 – which,
with his signature, all became crown
property. The merchants revelled; as one
of their newspapers put it: “the health of
the young and lovely queen of England
has been drunk, in flowing cups, on Her
Majesty being at the present moment the
largest holder of opium on record”.Aftermath of the deal
Even as Lin Zexu took stock of his
seemingly effortless victory at Canton,
Elliot was writing to Palmerston,
accusing Lin of threatening violence
against the merchants and demandinga war fleet to protect them. His demand
was accompanied by the astonishing
news that the British government was
now on the hook for £2,000,000-worth
of opium – and the drug merchants
wanted their money. Certain that
parliament would never provide those
funds, Palmerston convinced the cabinet
that Britain should make China pay.
And so a war was launched with the
initial aim of forcing China to pay for
the opium Lin Zexu destroyed. In 1840,
Britain sent an expeditionary force to
China, and by the time the war ended in
1842, Britain was demanding not just
payment for the opium but also that sev-
eral Chinese ports open to international
trade, and that Hong Kong be ceded
as a British colony. British supporters
of the war insisted that it was a point of
national honour, and nothing to do with
drugs. Critics easily saw through that
bluster but proved unable to stop the war.
When a motion in parliament intended
to prevent the conflict failed by just nine
votes, future prime minister William
Gladstone – who supported the motion- wrote in his diary that he was “in dread
of the judgements of God upon England
for our national iniquity towards China”.
In the long run, critics of the conflict
would have the last word. As The Specta-
tor declared angrily in 1840, no matter
how Britain’s government ministers
tried to paint the war with China as
a respectable one, “do what they can –
gloss it over as they may – THE
OPIUM WAR is the name by which
history will hand it down”.
“The government discovered it was
on the hook for £2,000,000 of opium”
Stephen Platt is professor of history at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of
Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End
of China’s Last Golden Age (Atlantic, 2018)ИЗП
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