And so China decides that it not only has to save its people from opium, it also needs to learn how to control the Brits in their country. So in , the emperor designates Commissioner Lin Zexu - and this is going to be our introduction to pronunciation warnings. We got a little help from a colleague, but -. Feel free to send us kind emails if you have pronunciation corrections. Anyway, Commissioner Lin is appointed by the emperor as the imperial commissioner, and he's authorized to do whatever is necessary to end the traffic of opium. And he does some things you might expect like rounding up the opium addicts and forcing them into treatment, punishing domestic drug dealers, and the domestic drug dealers were punished pretty steeply.
But he also goes to Canton where he seizes the opium off of ships and dumps it into the sea.
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And this radical act happened at the same time as the murder of a Chinese villager by drunk sailors. All of this got tensions brewing. And the British government won't hand over the sailors who killed the Chinese man to the Chinese government because they didn't trust the government, which of course makes the Chinese angry. So things aren't going well, and about the same time, Commissioner Lin says that China will completely cut off trade with Britain if the opium stuff doesn't happen.
And in February , the Brits decide to hell with it, that's the end of it, they're getting their military involved, and they're going to get in that market.
How the Opium Wars Worked
He wants full compensation for the opium dumped in the sea, but there's a problem with this war. China's at severe disadvantage because of the British gun power. And the British Royal Navy is absolutely fantastic. And the Chinese military simply isn't equipped or trained to be fighting against the sort of thing they're fighting against.
In June , 16 British warships show up at Hong Kong. A man named Charles Elliot starts negotiating for the Brits, and there's an agreement in January , but both sides hate it, and neither one of them wants to go with it. And in May , the British attack the walled city of Guangzhou, Canton, and get a six million dollar ransom. And the Cantonese attack them back. But again, the navy is simply too good, and the Chinese don't have an effective way to fight back.
They're offering rewards for British heads, but it's just not happening. And the tricky British propaganda of the time was putting it across like this. That they weren't there to fight the Chinese people, they were just there to fight the Chinese government and the soldiers who abused the people.
And there were also rifts in the British society about this war. I think Katie and I initially went into this thinking that the British people were all rah rah about the Opium War and trading with China, but that's not the case. A lot of people are against it, and they see it as something to be ashamed about, forcing opium, a drug that is illegal in England, on to the Chinese. It's denounced in Parliament by a young William Gladstone as an "unjust and iniquitous war.
And there's outrage on the pulpits and in the press and in America and England. Actually the outrage is so strong in America that a lot of the merchants there kind of back off from it, get out of the trade entirely. Commissioner Lin was also tr ying to push this moral argument. He wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, and it's uncertain if she even read this, but in it he was very frank, surprisingly frank for writing to Victoria. He writes, "The wealth of China is used to profit the barbarians.
That is to say the great prophet 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 conscious? And I'm sure Victoria loved her people being called barbarians, but you can't underestimate the human cost of what was going on at the time. The Chinese end up losing the war.
Yangwen Zheng
Elliot's successor, Henry Pottinger, captures several of their cities including Shanghai, and at Nanjing they give in. And this is where the treaty of Nanjing is signed on August 19th, It's the first treaty ever signed by China with any European power. And it's the first of what's known as the unequal treaties, and there is a reason for that.
China gives Hong Kong to Britain. They also open more ports to British trade. They agree to equal official recognition and they pay an indemnity of 21 million dollars. Some of that was payment for the opium that Commissioner Lin had destroyed. And they also give the right of British citizens to be tried by British courts, and they lower tariffs.
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And this is an especially awful part. Other western countries quickly demand their own privileges after seeing this treaty. To be part of the most favored nation clause, that's what everyone wants. And oddly, considering that this entire war is about opium, opium is not mentioned anywhere in this treaty, and this will come back to haunt us, as we'll see a little later. This treaty also sets up the treaty ports system, which means that in treaty ports, westerners weren't subject to China's laws.
They could do their own thing, set up their own legal situation and pretty much do things however they wanted. The major treaty ports in China were Shanghai and Guangzhou. But however, this is the one thing the Chinese did keep. Foreigners still weren't allowed in the interior of China. So the first opium war is over, but the problems aren't over, because opium is still an issue.
The question of opium isn't resolved in the treaty at all. Right, trade is still an issue, and the Chinese are still very unhappy about having the British in their country, and the British are unhappy, because they still don't have all of the rights and privileges they would like. So a man named Chi Yang is put in place as imperial commissioner, and he believes in appeasement. So things run smoothly for awhile. But trade doesn't increase the way the British thought it would, and again, the opium thing still isn't settled.
Yeah, you'd think with this sweet treaty they've worked out that everything would be more conducive to higher opium trade, but that doesn't happen. And the question of whether foreigners should be allowed into the walled city of Guangzhou still isn't settled. After the treaty it was declared open, but it never happened because the Chinese are really resistant to letting the "barbarians" as they thought of them into their walled city. And the Cantonese finally promise the British they can come in in , but they really aren't happy about it.
And as approaches, the protests begin because no one wants the British in there. The British gets in, the Beijing court grants temporary entrance, but the Cantonese have won this round, and I can't help rooting for China at this point. And there's a lot of xenophobia in China.
A lot of anti-foreign sentiment! And it only grows. And with the anti-foreign sentiment comes anti-government sentiment, and some of this ends up carrying into the Tai Ping Rebellion which is a radical political and religious upheaval that goes on from , and Katie and I might want to talk about this some more later. So we we're not going to give too much away.
We won't give too much away, but it's a pretty wild thing. It takes an estimate 20 million lives. And it permanently alters the Ching or Manchu Dynasty in the way that the Chinese government has worked for so long. But an interesting thing about the Tai Ping Rebellion is they're very anti-opium. It's actually a Christian rebellion. The leader believes that he's the son of God, which surprisingly that does not mean Jesus. He believes he's Jesus' younger brother, but he's very anti-opium, and all of the Tai Ping's credos are really Old Testament.
It's not about new testament style forgiveness and such, it's anti-opium, anti-alcohol and tobacco, prostitution, foot binding. So this radical social and government change is happening, also leading up to the second opium war. That failed to hamper the trade, and in the Jiaqing emperor outlawed opium importation and cultivation. In spite of such decrees, however, the opium trade continued to flourish.
The Opium Trade in China | Story of China | PBS
Early in the 18th century the Portuguese found that they could import opium from India and sell it in China at a considerable profit. By the British had discovered the trade, and that year they became the leading suppliers of the Chinese market. The British East India Company established a monopoly on opium cultivation in the Indian province of Bengal , where they developed a method of growing opium poppies cheaply and abundantly. Other Western countries also joined in the trade, including the United States , which dealt in Turkish as well as Indian opium. Britain and other European countries undertook the opium trade because of their chronic trade imbalance with China.
Consequently, Europeans had to pay for Chinese products with gold or silver. The opium trade, which created a steady demand among Chinese addicts for opium imported by the West, solved this chronic trade imbalance. The country traders sold the opium to smugglers along the Chinese coast.
The gold and silver the traders received from those sales were then turned over to the East India Company. In China the company used the gold and silver it received to purchase goods that could be sold profitably in England. The amount of opium imported into China increased from about chests annually in to roughly 1, chests in and then to about 10, per year between and The weight of each chest varied somewhat—depending on point of origin—but averaged approximately pounds By the amount had grown to some 40, chests imported into China annually.
The balance of payments for the first time began to run against China and in favour of Britain. Meanwhile, a network of opium distribution had formed throughout China, often with the connivance of corrupt officials. Levels of opium addiction grew so high that it began to affect the imperial troops and the official classes. The efforts of the Qing dynasty to enforce the opium restrictions resulted in two armed conflicts between China and the West, known as the Opium Wars , both of which China lost and which resulted in various measures that contributed to the decline of the Qing.
The first war, between Britain and China —42 , did not legalize the trade, but it did halt Chinese efforts to stop it. In the second Opium War —60 —fought between a British-French alliance and China—the Chinese government was forced to legalize the trade, though it did levy a small import tax on opium. By that time opium imports to China had reached 50, to 60, chests a year, and they continued to increase for the next three decades.
The trade was thus almost completely stopped by Opium smoking and addiction remained a problem in China during the subsequent decades, however, since the weakened central republican government could not wipe out the native cultivation of opium. Opium smoking was finally eradicated by the Chinese communists after they came to power in We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval.
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