Lin Zexu - Campaign To Suppress Opium

Campaign To Suppress Opium

An ever-growing demand for tea and low demand for British products, combined with the acceptance by China of only silver (and not gold) in payment, resulted in large continuous trade deficits. Attempts by the British (Macartney in 1792), the Dutch (Van Braam in 1794), Russia (Golovkin in 1805) and the British yet again (Amherst in 1816) to negotiate access to the China market were resounding failures. By 1817, the British hit upon counter-trading in a narcotic, Indian opium, as a way to both reduce the trade deficit and finally gain profit from the formerly money-losing Indian colony. The Qing government originally tolerated the importation of opium because it imposed an indirect tax on Chinese subjects, while allowing the British to double tea exports from China to England, which profited the monopoly for tea exports of the Qing imperial treasury and its agents. However, by 1820, the planting of tea in the Indian and African colonies, along with accelerated opium consumption, reversed the flow of silver, just when the Qing imperial treasury needed to finance the suppression of rebellions within China. The Viceroy of Guangdong began efforts to constrain the trade, but due to large increases in the supply of opium, the large coast line of South China, and corruption (the Qing coastal navy was one of the largest smugglers of opium), these efforts failed. Meanwhile, zhezou (折奏/摺奏; "memorials") received from officials such as Huang Juezi urged the Daoguang Emperor to take measures that would eliminate the opium trade.

A formidable bureaucrat known for his competence and high moral standards, Lin was sent to Guangdong as imperial commissioner by the emperor in late 1838 to halt the illegal importation of opium by the British. He arrived in March 1839 and made a huge impact on the opium trade within a matter of months. He arrested more than 1,700 Chinese opium dealers and confiscated over 70,000 opium pipes. He initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed and Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. It took Lin a month and a half before the merchants gave up nearly 1.2 million kilograms (2.6 million pounds) of opium. Beginning 3 June 1839, 500 workers laboured for 23 days in order to destroy all of it, mixing the opium with lime and salt and throwing it into the sea outside of Humen Town. 26 June is now the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in honour of Lin Zexu's work.

In 1839, Lin also wrote an extraordinary memorial to Queen Victoria in the form of an open letter published in Canton, urging her to end the opium trade. The letter is filled with Confucian concepts of morality and spirituality. As a representative of the Qing court, Lin adopts a position of superiority and his tone is condescending, despite the British clearly having the upper hand, in terms of military prowess, when the event is examined with hindsight. His primary line of argument is that China is providing Britain with valuable commodities such as tea, porcelain, spices and silk, while Britain sends only "poison" in return. He accuses the "barbarians" (a reference to the private merchants) of coveting profit and lacking morality. His memorial expressed a desire that the Queen would act "in accordance with decent feeling" and support his efforts. He writes:

We find that your country is sixty or seventy thousand li from China. Yet there are barbarian ships that strive to come here for trade for the purpose of making a great profit. The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians. That is to say, the great profit made by barbarians is all taken from the rightful share of China. By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience? —Lin Zexu, Open letter addressed to the sovereign of England and published in Canton (1839)

The memorial was never delivered to the Queen, though it was later published in The Times.

Open hostilities between China and Britain started in 1839. A naval skirmish in the autumn of 1839, following the politic afterspell of the opium hand-over, was in fact the very first act of war, in what later would be recalled as "The First Opium War" . The immediate effect was that both sides, by the words of Superintendent Captain Charles Elliot, and the Chinese High-Commissioner Lin Zexu made a ban to all trade. Before this, Lin had pressured the Portuguese government of Macau, so the British found themselves without refuge, except for the bare and rocky harbours of Hong Kong.