456 Part VI: European Empires in Asia
with a concrete strategy for dealing with it. Lin Zexu was appointed the
emperor’s “drug czar” and was sent to Canton.
There were early signs that trouble was ahead for the opium business. A
crowd of soldiers arrived outside the European factories one day with a cap-
tured Chinese smuggler in a basket. In minutes the prisoner was hoisted and
strangled before the horrified eyes of the watching foreigners. The body was left
to hang as a sign of government’s new resolve. Then, one morning in 1839,
shortly after Commissioner Lin’s arrival, workmen arrived and began bricking
up the entrances to Hog Lane, New China Street, and the various alleys by
which servants entered the 15-acre area of European factories. Servants disap-
peared. Travel to Macao was forbidden. Next, the foreigners were ordered to
turn over all their crates of opium. They balked at first and then realized they
had no choice but to give in. Twenty thousand chests of opium were delivered
to Commissioner Lin, who systematically destroyed it all before allowing the
foreigners to finally escape down river to Macao.
The perfectly reasonable—in retrospect—actions of Commissioner Lin
provoked war with Britain. The reasoning of the British government might at
first be hard to grasp. They did not go to war directly to defend the opium
trade, but they defended it with various rationales. One British official in IndiaCommissioner Lin with an imperial commission from the Daoguang emperor to halt the illegal
importation of opium by the British, destroying thousands of chests of opium in 1839. Lin Zexu,
1785–1850, courtesy name Yuanfu. Chinese scholar-official of the Qing dynasty. From Hutchin-
son’s History of the Nations, published 1915.