Lin Zexu and the Opium War: 1,420 Tons Destroyed and a Letter Never Read

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Under the Canton system, Qing China confined European merchants to the Thirteen Factories at Guangzhou, forced them to trade through the Cohong guild, and sold tea, silk, and porcelain only for silver. To stop the drain of silver, the British East India Company scaled up opium in Bengal, auctioned it in Calcutta, and private merchants anchored it off Lintin Island, where Chinese smugglers in fast boats called fast crabs and scrambling dragons ran it inland. As silver flowed out, peasants paid in copper faced soaring tax bills. Against officials who wanted to legalize and tax the drug, the scholar official Lin Zexu demanded eradication, and in 1839 the Daoguang emperor sent him to Guangzhou as imperial commissioner.

Lin blockaded the foreign merchants in their enclave, forced them to surrender about 3.1 million pounds of opium, and from June 3, 1839, destroyed it at Humen beach with salt and lime. He wrote to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could export a poison it supposedly banned at home; the letter never reached her. When drunk British and American sailors killed a villager, Lin Weixi, Captain Charles Elliot refused to hand them over, and war followed. Iron steamships like the Nemesis outclassed the coastal forts, and the 1842 Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong, opened five ports, imposed extraterritoriality, and charged 21 million silver taels. Lin was blamed and exiled to the northwest frontier.

• Foreigners in Guangzhou could not bring families, ride in sedan chairs, or learn Chinese.
• Elliot's refusal drew on the Lady Hughes affair, in which British subjects handed over to Chinese authorities were executed by strangulation.
• Part of the indemnity compensated British merchants for the very opium Lin had destroyed.
• Because the treaty never addressed opium, imports into China doubled in the years that followed.
• Disgraced in his lifetime, Lin is now honored in China as a patriot who resisted foreign exploitation.