Britain's most profitable drug trade blasted open Qing ports
The First Opium War, or Anglo-Chinese War, pitted Britain against Qing China after Canton crackdowns on opium. The Royal Navy's June 1840 expedition forced unequal treaties; nationalists later dated a 'century of humiliation' from 1839, and many historians call it modern China's starting gun.
Europe's direct sea trade with China dates from 1557, when Portugal leased Macau from the Ming. British vessels turned up from 1635, but without tributary relations their merchants were confined to Zhoushan, Xiamen and Guangzhou, and after the Qing eased maritime rules in the 1680s Guangzhou became the favoured port. Europeans craved silk, porcelain and above all tea, and from the mid-seventeenth century roughly 28 million kilograms of silver flowed into China to pay for them, leaving Europe with chronic deficits as its own need for bullion grew.
Opium offered a way to reverse that flow. Chinese texts mention the drug as medicine as early as the Tang dynasty, and the Qing first restricted it in 1729 by banning madak, a mix of opium and tobacco. British merchants took over the trade after occupying Java from 1811 to 1816, and the East India Company expanded production in India, having begun limited sales in 1781. It became Britain's single most lucrative commodity of the century.
Officials were quietly ignoring warehouses full of the drug, so in 1839 the Daoguang Emperor rejected legalisation and sent Lin Zexu to stamp out the trade at Guangzhou. Lin wrote to Queen Victoria, though she never saw the letter, forced British dealers to surrender 1,420 tonnes of opium in March, and had it destroyed publicly on Humen Beach on 3 June. In July drunken British sailors killed a villager, Lin Weixi, and Charles Elliot refused to hand them over, remembering the 1784 Lady Hughes affair. London backed its merchants' compensation claims in the name of free trade and diplomatic equality.
A naval expedition arrived in June 1840, and British ships and guns won a string of decisive victories. Troops occupied Hong Kong in January 1841, and the Treaty of Nanking of 29 August 1842, the first of the unequal treaties, imposed an indemnity, extraterritorial rights, five treaty ports and the cession of Hong Kong Island, which stayed British until 1 July 1997. Unmet British aims led to the Second Opium War, and the unrest fed the Taiping Rebellion.
Source: First Opium War
