Decline, Fall, and Aftermath of the Qing Empire 105
their “factories” (warehouses). They would be released, he declared,
only when they handed over all the opium in their control. Within two
months, Commissioner Lin collected more than 21,000 chests of opium
(each weighing about fi ve hundred pounds), which was about half the
annual total trade. Much to the shock of the Western merchants in
Guangzhou, and to the British government in London, Lin proceeded
to publicly destroy this entire supply of opium, which could have sold
for somewhere between $10 and $20 million.^4
What Commissioner Lin and the Qing government saw as a wholly
justifi ed law enforcement operation the British government saw as an act
of piracy against free trade, a severe violation of the rights of British sub-
jects, and an insult to the British Crown. Great Britain sent an expedition-
ary force of sixteen warships, four armed steamers, twenty-seven transport
ships, and one troop ship to China in 1840, with a total of 4,000 British
troops. The Chinese had no naval forces capable of defeating such a force
and little comprehension of how deadly serious the British government was
in its determination to force the opium trade to continue and to grow.
After two years of failed negotiations alternating with fi ghting, the
British forces (increased to 10,000 troops) eventually blockaded China’s
major eastern seaport cities and sailed up the Yangzi River to Nanjing,
threatening to cut the Qing Empire in half. The court at this point had
little choice but to surrender and to accept every humiliating condition
the British demanded. The result was the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842,
which stipulated that China would pay for all the British expenses in
the Opium War ($12 million), the market cost of the opium destroyed
(conservatively set at $6 million), and the accumulated debts of Chinese
merchant houses owed to British merchants ($3 million). In addition,
Great Britain took control of Hong Kong, an island of fi shing villages
off the south China coast, which had what turned out to be one of
the best deepwater harbors in the world. Four new coastal cities were
opened to trade with the British, and China promised to deal with West-
ern governments as equals in the future.
In a supplementary treaty following the Opium War, China agreed
to set a fi xed tariff rate on its trade with the Western countries, to extend
its agreements with Britain to every other Western country, and to allow
Westerners in China to be subject not to Chinese law but to Western
laws, under what was called extraterritoriality. The Qing court agreed
to these stipulations without realizing that they were in effect giving up
control of their own policies in trade and foreign relations. Opium was
politely not mentioned in any of these agreements, but it was under-
stood on both sides that the opium trade would continue without being