Lin Zexu - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Lin died in 1850 while on the way to Guangxi, where the Qing government was sending him to help put down the Taiping Rebellion. He was opposed to the opening of China but felt the need of a better knowledge of foreigners, which drove him to collect much material for a geography of the world. He later gave this material to Wei Yuan, who published an Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (海國圖志; Haiguo Tuzhi) in 1844.

June 3, the day when Lin confiscated the chests of opium, is celebrated as Anti-Smoking Day in the Republic of China (Taiwan). Manhattan's Chatham Square, in Chinatown, contains a statue of Lin, commemorating his early struggle against drug use. Although he has in essence led the war against the debilitating drug with some initial success, with the arrest of 1,700 opium dealers and destruction of 2.6 million pounds of opium, he had been made the scapegoat for the actions leading to British retaliation, and ultimately failing to stem the tide of opium import and use in China. Nevertheless, Lin Zexu is popularly viewed as a hero of superlative conduct and national service, and whose likeness have been immortalized at various locations around the world.

Despite the antagonism between the Chinese and the British at the time, the English sinologist Herbert Giles, who was active in the later part of the 19th century and was the co-creator of the Wade-Giles transliteration, praised and admired Lin: "He was a fine scholar, a just and merciful official and a true patriot." A wax statue of Lin also appeared in Madame Tussauds wax museum in London.

More recently, Lin Zexu has appeared as a character in River of Smoke, the second novel in the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh, which takes the Opium Wars as its setting to shed new light on a much-repressed history while offering a contemporary critique of globalization. The novel takes place in 1838-1839, during which time Commissioner Lin arrived in Canton and tensions escalated between the foreigners and the Chinese officials.

The period has also been examined in the novelist Timothy Mo"'s novel An Insular Possession", which explores the birth of Hong Kong in the context of the Opium Wars.