Lin Zexu and the Destruction of the Opium at Humen

On the morning of 3 June 1839, on a long stone quay at the river-mouth town of Humen, on the western bank of the Pearl River about fifty kilometres downstream from Canton, two thousand Chinese labourers began to break open chests of British-owned opium. The chests had been confiscated, in the previous weeks, from the bonded warehouses of the foreign hong merchants in Canton by a newly arrived Imperial Commissioner named Lin Zexu, who had been sent south from Beijing by the Daoguang Emperor with extraordinary plenipotentiary powers to put an end to the opium trade. By the end of the day, three hundred and thirty-seven chests of the dark, tar-like drug had been tipped into a great tidal trench that had been dug into the mud of the riverbank, mixed with salt water and quicklime, and flushed out with the rising tide into the Pearl River. By the end of the destruction, which lasted from 3 June to 25 June 1839, more than 23,000 chests of opium, weighing roughly 1,200 tons, had been destroyed. The figure represented, on a conservative estimate, two years of British-Indian opium imports into the whole of the Chinese market. The destruction was the immediate cause of the First Opium War, the war that was to end with the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the ceding of Hong Kong Island to the British Crown in perpetuity. To understand why the destruction of opium at Humen, in the early summer of 1839, became the opening of a century of humiliation, one has to look at the long history of the opium trade in China, at the character of Lin Zexu, and at the specific circumstances of the Daoguang reign.

The long history of opium in China

Opium had been known in China for at least a millennium before the events of 1839. The drug had been used, in modest quantities, as a medicine from at least the Tang dynasty, and small quantities of the drug had been imported into the Chinese market from the Arab world and from the Indian subcontinent for several centuries. The Chinese state had never formally prohibited the medicinal use of opium, although the court had issued repeated regulations about the cultivation of the opium poppy within China itself, and the court had occasionally prohibited the smoking of opium as a non-medicinal practice. The combination of medicinal use, occasional prohibitions, and the slow growth of an addiction habit among the wealthy classes had kept the Chinese opium market small through most of the eighteenth century. By the late eighteenth century, the annual import of opium into China was, on a reasonable estimate, in the order of four or five thousand chests per year, a quantity that was small enough to be absorbed by the Chinese medicinal market without serious social effects.

The scale of the opium trade changed dramatically in the 1780s, when the British East India Company, which had been running a large deficit on its China trade through the late eighteenth century, began to encourage the cultivation of the opium poppy in its Indian territories of Bengal and Bihar. The Company itself, because of the official ban on the opium trade, did not directly sell opium to the Chinese market: the Company’s role was to grow the opium in India, sell it at auction in Calcutta, and license the export of the drug to private British merchants, who would then sell it to the Chinese smugglers along the southern coast. The system allowed the Company to maintain the fiction that the opium trade was a private matter, while simultaneously collecting a large revenue from the opium auctions in India. The revenue from the opium auctions became, by the early nineteenth century, one of the largest single sources of the Company’s income, and the revenue was, in turn, used to finance the Company’s other operations, including the China trade in tea and silk. The system was, in effect, a great piece of imperial financial engineering, and the system was one of the most important features of the British imperial economy of the early nineteenth century.

The growth of the British-Indian opium trade had profound effects on the Chinese market. By the early 1830s, the annual import of opium into China had grown from four or five thousand chests in the 1780s to more than thirty thousand chests per year. The opium was sold, mostly, to Chinese smugglers who distributed the drug through a network of coastal and inland markets. The Chinese state had repeatedly tried to suppress the trade, but the suppression efforts had been defeated by the combination of British military power along the coast, the corruption of the local Chinese officials, the demand for the drug among the wealthy Chinese classes, and the financial interests of the Chinese hong merchants who acted as the official intermediaries for the foreign trade at Canton. The Canton System, the elaborate set of regulations that governed the foreign trade at Canton, had been developed in the eighteenth century to keep the foreign merchants under Chinese control, but the Canton System had been progressively undermined, in the early nineteenth century, by the growth of the opium trade. By the late 1830s, the Chinese state was losing, in opium revenues, more than ten million taels of silver per year, and the silver outflow was, in turn, destabilising the Chinese economy.

The Chinese state had tried, in the 1830s, a series of increasingly desperate measures to suppress the opium trade. The Daoguang Emperor, who had succeeded to the throne in 1820, had appointed a series of commissioners to investigate the trade and to recommend measures for its suppression. The most prominent of the early commissioners was a man named Husan Ada (also romanised as Xu Naiji), who had been sent to Canton in 1836 to investigate the trade and who had recommended, in a memorial to the throne, that the opium trade be legalised and subjected to a state monopoly on the same lines as the salt monopoly. The recommendation was opposed by a group of officials at the Beijing court, who argued that the legalisation of the opium trade would be a moral catastrophe and that the trade had to be suppressed by force. The opposition was led by a group of moralist officials, including the famous scholar-official Deng Tingzhen, who had been Viceroy of Huguang, and by a young official from Fujian named Lin Zexu, who had been one of the most prominent critics of the opium trade at the Beijing court. The opposition won the argument at the Beijing court, and the Daoguang Emperor, in late 1838, decided to appoint a special Imperial Commissioner with extraordinary plenipotentiary powers to go to Canton and suppress the trade by force. The Commissioner appointed, in March 1839, was Lin Zexu.

Lin Zexu

Lin Zexu was, on the available evidence, born in 1785 in the port city of Fuzhou, in the south-eastern coastal province of Fujian, into a family of modest scholarly means. His father, Lin Binri, had been a teacher and a minor official, and the family had a tradition of public service that went back several generations. Lin Zexu was educated in the Confucian classics in the customary manner, and he passed the lower-level civil service examinations in his teens, and the provincial-level juren examination in 1809, at the age of twenty-four. He had a long and distinguished career in the Qing civil service before his appointment as Imperial Commissioner. He had served as an official in various parts of the Chinese empire, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Hubei, and he had earned a reputation as a thorough, methodical, and incorruptible administrator. He had also earned a reputation as a writer on the opium question. In 1838, he had submitted to the Daoguang Emperor a memorial that has become one of the most famous memorials in the history of the late Qing. The memorial, which is known as the ‘Yapian zhaji zoudu’ (奏請嚴禁鴉片折), argued that the opium trade was a moral and economic catastrophe and that the trade had to be suppressed by the most drastic measures available to the state. The memorial caught the attention of the Daoguang Emperor, and Lin Zexu was appointed, in March 1839, as Imperial Commissioner with plenipotentiary powers to go to Canton and put an end to the opium trade.

Lin Zexu arrived in Canton on 10 March 1839, accompanied by a small retinue of officials, a detachment of troops, and a substantial quantity of official stationery. He took up residence in the Confucian Temple in Canton, and he began, in the days after his arrival, a series of meetings with the local officials, the hong merchants, and the foreign community. The meetings were conducted with great formality, and Lin Zexu used the meetings to make it clear to all parties that the Daoguang Emperor was determined to put an end to the opium trade. The British Superintendent of Trade at Canton, Captain Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy, was the official representative of the British government at Canton, and Elliot was, on the available evidence, a man of considerable diplomatic skill. Elliot had been the British Consul at Canton since 1834, and he had been involved, in that capacity, in the negotiations over the opium trade for several years. Elliot was, in the spring of 1839, in a difficult position. He was the representative of the British government, but the opium trade was officially illegal, and the British government had, in the official instructions to Elliot, instructed him to avoid any direct involvement in the opium trade.

The crisis developed in the weeks after Lin Zexu’s arrival. Lin Zexu had demanded, in the first of his official communications, that the foreign merchants at Canton surrender all of the opium in their possession. The demand was, in effect, an ultimatum: the foreign merchants had three days to surrender all of the opium, and any merchant who refused would be subject to the death penalty under the Chinese law against opium dealing. The foreign community at Canton was, at first, divided on how to respond. The British community was the largest, and the British merchants held most of the opium. The British community was also divided: the large firms such as Jardine Matheson, which were heavily invested in the opium trade, wanted to resist Lin Zexu’s demand, while the smaller firms and the American community, which were less invested in the trade, were more inclined to comply. Charles Elliot, who had been initially inclined to support the merchants, was eventually persuaded that the best way to avoid a military confrontation was to surrender the opium and to claim compensation from the British government for the surrendered property. Elliot communicated the surrender decision to Lin Zexu on 27 May 1839, and the surrender was, on the available evidence, the largest single surrender of a private property in the history of the British Empire to that date. The total quantity of opium surrendered was 20,283 chests, weighing roughly 1,000 tons, with a market value, at the Canton prices of the time, of about two million pounds sterling. The surrender was, in effect, a confiscation of British-owned private property by the Chinese state, and the confiscation was, in due course, the immediate cause of the war.

The destruction at Humen

The opium that was surrendered by the British merchants at Canton was, in the weeks after the surrender, transported by a fleet of small boats from the foreign factories at Canton to the river-mouth town of Humen, on the western bank of the Pearl River about fifty kilometres downstream from Canton. Humen had been chosen as the site of the destruction for several reasons. The town was downstream of Canton, so that any accidental spillage of the opium would not contaminate the water supply of the city. The town was at a wide point of the river, where the river was at least a mile wide, so that the destruction would not obstruct the main channel. The town was on the main road between Canton and the open sea, so that the destruction would be visible to the British ships in the river. The town was also the historic site of several earlier Chinese victories against foreign invaders, including the famous defeat of the British fleet in the 1630s by the Ming general Zhang Rulin, and the site was, in effect, a symbolic location for the Chinese action.

The destruction was carried out, in the period from 3 June to 25 June 1839, with extraordinary care and ceremony. The site of the destruction was a long stone quay that had been built, in earlier decades, as a loading point for the salt trade, and the quay was, in the days before the destruction, transformed into a great outdoor destruction site. Three long trenches, each about 50 metres long, 5 metres wide, and 2 metres deep, were dug into the mud of the riverbank parallel to the quay, and the trenches were connected to the river by a series of channels that would allow the rising tide to fill the trenches with water. The trenches were filled with salt water from the river, and a large quantity of quicklime was added to the water to make a strongly alkaline solution. The chests of opium, each weighing about 60 kilograms, were then broken open with axes and mallets, and the dark, tar-like drug was tipped into the alkaline solution. The opium, in contact with the alkaline solution, dissolved rapidly, and the dissolved opium was then flushed out of the trenches, by the rising tide, into the Pearl River. The process was supervised, at every stage, by Lin Zexu personally, and the destruction was carried out in the presence of the local officials, the hong merchants, the foreign community, and a large crowd of onlookers from the surrounding countryside. The destruction was, in effect, a great public event, and the destruction was, in turn, a deliberate demonstration of the Chinese state’s determination to put an end to the opium trade.

The total quantity of opium destroyed at Humen, by the end of 25 June 1839, was, on the official Chinese records, 23,000 chests, weighing roughly 1,200 tons. The figure has been the subject of some scholarly debate. The figure is larger than the figure of 20,283 chests that had been surrendered by the British merchants at Canton, and the difference is, in part, due to additional opium that had been surrendered by the American merchants and the Chinese smugglers, and in part due to opium that had been discovered in the warehouses of the foreign hong merchants. The total figure of 23,000 chests is, in any case, a very large figure, and the figure represents, on any reasonable estimate, two or three years of British-Indian opium exports to China. The destruction was, in effect, a severe economic blow to the British-Indian opium trade, and the destruction was, in turn, a direct challenge to the British imperial financial system that depended on the opium auctions in India.

The British response and the First Opium War

The British response to the destruction of the opium at Humen was, in the first instance, a diplomatic response. Captain Charles Elliot, who had been the British Superintendent of Trade at Canton during the crisis, returned to London in the autumn of 1839 to report to the British government on the events. Elliot was, on the available evidence, a man of considerable diplomatic skill, and he was able to persuade the British government, in the months after his return, that the Chinese action had been a violation of British property rights and that the British government had a legitimate casus belli against the Chinese state. The British government, which was at the time a Whig government under Lord Melbourne, was initially cautious about the prospect of war, but the case for war was eventually taken up by Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, who argued that the British government had a duty to protect British property and British honour. The British government decided, in October 1839, to send a military expedition to China, and the expedition, which was to be commanded by Rear Admiral George Elliot (the Superintendent’s cousin) and by the diplomat Henry Pottinger, was to consist of a small fleet of warships and a small army of about four thousand men. The expedition was, in effect, a limited punitive expedition, and the expedition was not, in the original conception, intended to acquire territory from China.

The First Opium War began, in a formal sense, on 21 June 1840, when a British naval squadron arrived in the waters off Canton and blockaded the Chinese coast. The British squadron, which consisted of sixteen warships and several transports, had been assembled in India and in the Cape Colony, and the squadron had been under orders, since the autumn of 1839, to proceed to China as soon as the monsoon was favourable. The squadron arrived in the Chinese waters in the early summer of 1840, and the squadron immediately began a series of naval actions along the Chinese coast. The British naval actions were, on the available evidence, devastating in their effect. The British warships were faster, more heavily armed, and more skilfully handled than the Chinese junks, and the British naval actions quickly established control of the coastal waters. The British land forces, which had been put ashore at several points along the coast, were also effective against the Chinese land forces, which were equipped with obsolete weapons and were not organised for modern European-style warfare.

The British naval actions were followed, in the winter of 1840 to 1841, by a series of negotiations between the British and the Chinese governments. The negotiations were conducted, on the British side, by Captain Charles Elliot, and on the Chinese side by Qiying, a Manchu nobleman who had been appointed as the chief Chinese negotiator after Lin Zexu had been dismissed from his post and exiled to the remote province of Xinjiang. The negotiations were difficult and protracted, and the negotiations produced, in March 1841, an initial agreement, the so-called ‘Chuenpi Convention’, which would have ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain in perpetuity and which would have opened the ports of Canton and Xiamen to British trade. The Chuenpi Convention was, however, rejected by both governments. The Daoguang Emperor rejected the convention because he believed that the British had taken advantage of the negotiations to make additional demands, and Lord Palmerston rejected the convention because he believed that the British had not obtained sufficient concessions from the Chinese. The negotiations were, in effect, a failure, and the war was resumed in the summer of 1841.

The Treaty of Nanking

The resumption of the war in the summer of 1841 was, on the available evidence, even more decisive than the first phase. The British forces, which had been reinforced by additional warships and troops from India, took the strategic coastal cities of Xiamen (Amoy), Ningbo, and Zhapu in quick succession, and the British forces also captured, in the early months of 1842, the walled city of Zhenjiang, on the lower Yangtze. The fall of Zhenjiang, which was the principal garrison city on the lower Yangtze, was a serious strategic loss for the Chinese state, because Zhenjiang commanded the approach to the city of Nanking, the old Ming capital that gave its name to the treaty. The fall of Zhenjiang was followed, in the summer of 1842, by the appearance of British warships off the walls of Nanking itself, and the appearance of the British warships off Nanking persuaded the Daoguang Emperor that the war had to be ended. The emperor appointed Qiying, who had been the chief Chinese negotiator in the earlier phase of the war, as the chief Chinese negotiator for the final settlement, and the British government appointed Sir Henry Pottinger, who had arrived in China in the spring of 1841 as the chief British negotiator, as the chief British negotiator for the final settlement.

The Treaty of Nanking was signed on 29 August 1842, on board the British warship HMS Cornwallis, anchored off the walls of Nanking. The treaty was signed, on the British side, by Sir Henry Pottinger, and on the Chinese side, by Qiying, Yilibu, and Niu Jian. The treaty consisted of thirteen articles, and the treaty imposed on the Chinese state a series of unprecedented concessions. The first three articles concerned the cession of territory. Article I of the treaty ceded Hong Kong Island to the British Crown in perpetuity. Article II of the treaty required the Chinese state to pay the British government an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, in three instalments, in the period from 1843 to 1845. The 21 million silver dollars consisted of 6 million for the opium that had been destroyed at Humen, 3 million for the debts of the bankrupt hong merchants, and 12 million for the cost of the war. Article III of the treaty required the Chinese state to open five ports to British trade: Canton, Xiamen (Amoy), Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. The five ports were to be open to British trade under the same conditions as Canton, and the British merchants were to be allowed to reside in the five ports and to trade with the Chinese population.

The remaining articles of the Treaty of Nanking were, in many respects, as important as the first three. Article IV required the Chinese state to fix the tariff rates on British imports at a level that had been agreed with the British government, and the article prohibited the Chinese state from levying additional duties on British goods. Article V required the Chinese state to abolish the old Canton System, the elaborate set of regulations that had governed the foreign trade at Canton, and to allow the British merchants to trade directly with the Chinese population. Article VI required the Chinese state to allow British warships to enter the five treaty ports for the protection of British commerce. Article VII required the Chinese state to publish the terms of the treaty in the capital, Beijing, and to make the terms known to the Chinese people. The remaining articles of the treaty dealt with the details of the implementation of the principal concessions. The treaty was, in effect, a comprehensive settlement of the issues that had been raised by the war, and the treaty was, in turn, the foundation of the treaty system that was to govern the relations between China and the Western powers for the next hundred years.

Aftermath and significance

The Treaty of Nanking was, in the long history of Chinese foreign relations, a watershed. The treaty was the first of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’, and the treaty was the first of the series of treaties that were to govern the relations between China and the Western powers for the next hundred years. The treaty was followed, in 1843, by a Supplementary Treaty, the so-called ‘Treaty of the Bogue’, which added a most-favoured-nation clause to the original treaty. The most-favoured-nation clause provided that any concession that the Chinese state might grant to any other foreign power would automatically be extended to the British government. The most-favoured-nation clause was, in effect, a device by which the British government could ensure that its commercial position in China would not be undercut by the activities of other foreign powers, and the most-favoured-nation clause was, in due course, a model for similar clauses in the treaties that the Chinese state was to sign with the United States, France, and other Western powers in the 1840s and 1850s.

The Treaty of Nanking had profound effects on the Chinese economy. The opening of the five ports to British trade allowed a large expansion of the British commercial presence in China, and the expansion was, in turn, accompanied by a large expansion of the opium trade. The opium trade, which had been the original cause of the war, was, in effect, legalised by the treaty: the treaty did not, in its terms, legalise the opium trade, but the treaty also did not prohibit the trade, and the British merchants, who had been the principal importers of opium before the war, resumed the opium trade on a large scale. The opium trade was, in the years after the treaty, to grow to unprecedented levels, and the opium trade was, in turn, one of the principal sources of the social and economic disruption of the late Qing period.

The Treaty of Nanking had profound effects on the Chinese political system. The treaty was, in effect, the first major military defeat of the Qing state in a long period, and the defeat exposed the weaknesses of the Qing military and the Qing political system. The defeat was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the reform movements of the late Qing, including the Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s to 1890s, the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, and the New Policies of the early 1900s. The defeat was, in due course, one of the principal causes of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which was to bring the Qing dynasty to an end. The defeat was, in the longer term, one of the principal causes of the political and intellectual reorientation of the Chinese elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the reorientation was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the great social and political changes of the twentieth century.

The Treaty of Nanking had profound effects on the Chinese conception of the world. The treaty was, in effect, the first major contact of the Chinese state with the Western international system, and the contact was, in turn, a great shock to the Chinese worldview. The Chinese worldview, which had been based on the assumption that the Chinese state was the centre of the civilised world, was now confronted with a Western international system that was, in many respects, incompatible with the Chinese worldview. The confrontation was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the great intellectual reorientation of the late Qing, including the Self-Strengthening Movement, the reform movements of the 1890s and 1900s, and the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s. The reorientation was, in due course, one of the principal causes of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and the May Fourth Movement was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the political and cultural reorientation of the twentieth century.

The destruction of the opium at Humen, in the early summer of 1839, was, in the long history of Chinese foreign relations, the opening of a century of humiliation. The destruction was, in the first instance, a deliberate demonstration of the Chinese state’s determination to suppress the opium trade, and the destruction was, in the second instance, a direct challenge to the British imperial financial system. The destruction was, in the third instance, the immediate cause of the First Opium War, and the war was, in turn, the immediate cause of the Treaty of Nanking. The treaty was, in the fourth instance, the foundation of the treaty system that was to govern the relations between China and the Western powers for the next hundred years, and the treaty system was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the political and intellectual reorientation of the late Qing and the early Republic. The destruction at Humen was, in the longer term, the opening of a century of humiliation, and the century of humiliation was, in turn, one of the principal causes of the great political and social changes of the twentieth century.

References

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