The Opium Wars & Meiji Japan

In the 1830s, the Qing Empire was the most populous state on earth. It had a functioning bureaucracy, a long literary tradition, a sophisticated tax system, and a military that had conquered Central Asia within living memory. It also had a trade problem. European merchants wanted Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. Chinese merchants had almost no interest in anything Europe produced. Silver flowed east. The British East India Company, perpetually unhappy about this arrangement, found a product the Chinese market would absorb in enormous quantities: opium.

The poppy fields of Bengal became the engine of a triangular trade. Indian peasants grew the poppies. The East India Company processed the raw opium and auctioned it to private traders. Those traders shipped it to Canton, the single port where the Qing government permitted foreign commerce, and sold it to Chinese smugglers who distributed it inland. By the late 1830s, an estimated two million Chinese were addicted. Silver now flowed west. The Qing treasury was draining. The social fabric in southern China was visibly fraying.

Emperor Daoguang appointed Lin Zexu, a senior official known for his incorruptibility, as Imperial Commissioner with orders to end the opium trade. Lin arrived in Canton in March 1839. He was methodical. He confined foreign traders to their quarters, cut off their food supplies, and demanded they surrender their opium stocks. After six weeks of standoff, the British superintendent of trade, Charles Elliot, ordered the merchants to comply. Lin seized and destroyed over twenty thousand chests of opium, roughly 1,400 tons, dissolving it in trenches of lime and salt water that drained into the sea.