1

FORBIDDEN CITIES

Why did the Qing dynasty Chinese take to smoking opium? The question is fundamental, yet likely to remain forever shrouded in mystery. Humans have consumed opium since the dawn of historical time, and the use of the poppy’s sap is thought to have been pioneered in Asia Minor or Mesopotamia. The name originates in the Greek word opion, the root of both the Persian word afyun and the Chinese yapian, hinting at the route the drug took eastward through conquest or trade.1 Opium had been used in China since the Tang dynasty (seventh to ninth centuries AD), but, as in the Indian subcontinent or Europe, it served as an ingredient in medicinal preparations. In China, opium was long used for combating diarrhoea, dysentery, sunstroke, coughing, asthma, and other pains and ailments.² A major change took place when tobacco arrived via the Philippines or the Indonesian archipelago.³ In Indonesia and the Malay peninsula, it had become local practice to blend opium with tobacco, forming a product known as madat and designed to be smoked. The custom spread to Taiwan, where local plants were thrown in to make a boiled concoction now named madak. After the Qing conquered Taiwan in 1683, Chinese seafarers – sailors, labourers, merchants – began to carry madak back home.⁴

Thus adulterated, opium entered the user’s body only in small quantities. From the mid-eighteenth century, though, it began to be smoked pure. Madak smoking had begun as a simple affair: on Taiwan, the blend was placed in a hollow clay pot and smoked through a bamboo tube and a filter made of coir fibres produced from coconut trees. Pure opium smoking, by contrast, was the object of sophisticated rituals and even connoisseurship. Opium was typically smoked reclining. Its preparation required dexterity and training, and it was difficult to perform for a beginner. The smoker, or a servant or waitress in a den, would first roll and knead a small ball of opium, with the help of two needles, over the flame of a lamp. This brought it to the right temperature and to a texture much like that of caramelized sugar. Still using one of the needles, the operator would cut a conical pellet from the ball and flatten this again to fit it on top of the smoking bowl. The bowl itself, an often ornate china or metal globe affixed to the pipe, contained a smaller aperture through which the smoke flowed. The pellet was pierced into a doughnut shape to leave this aperture free. The fumes were now ready to seep through. The smoker leaned the pipe towards the lamp’s flame, pressed his or her lips around the mouthpiece and sucked.5 A contemporary describes the experience:

On a miserable rainy day, or when you feel down, light up an opium lamp on a low table, recline face to face, pass the pipe around and inhale. At first there is a sudden feeling of refreshment, one’s head and eyes becoming very clear. Soon afterwards, there is quietude and profound well-being. After a while, one’s bones and joints become extremely relaxed and the eyes heavy. This is followed by a gradual descent into slumber, and detached from all worries, one enters a world of dreams and fantasies, completely free like a spirit: what a paradise!⁶

The ostensible explanation for the spread of recreational opium, especially pure, is that it emerged as a social marker. High Qing China was exceptionally prosperous; it saw the flowering of lively consumer and leisure cultures. Among the moneyed classes, the fashion was for exotic goods: carpets, glasses, pens, pictures, musical boxes, watches . . . Opium became another article of pleasure: urban and civilized, like its consumers.⁷ In an era when music halls, tea houses and other places of entertainment flourished, it joined the list of items of conspicuous and hedonistic consumption. Urban China was endowed with quarters of river boats filled with tea or smoking shops, many of them hosting prostitutes, and their prices favoured a clientele of rich merchants, literati and mandarins. These establishments began purveying madak and, later, pure opium. From there, opium spread into the better-appointed home or the dedicated public house or ‘den’.8 Soon, rich families employed opium butlers. They collected prize versions of the utensils: items encrusted with silver mimicking flowers and leaves, ornate lamps or pipes made of precious wood, jade or tortoiseshell, or carved out of ivory in the shape of elephants’ tusks. Opium even earned its own vocabulary, like oenology, with ‘yellow’, ‘long’ or ‘loose’ used to describe its various states, and the expression ‘to light the lamp’ became a euphemism for sharing the comfort of one’s smoking chamber.⁹

As opium spread inland from the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, the volumes smoked rose slowly but surely. If one trusts the records of opium’s principal carrier at the time, the Dutch East India Company, Chinese imports in the first half of the eighteenth century were in the order of two hundred chests annually.¹⁰ (The chest, which would become a standard packaging and weight unit under the British East India Company, weighed around 60 kilograms (130 lb).) At this level, it is likely that most opium was still taken as medicine rather than mixed into madak. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, and after the emergence of pure opium smoking, imports had reached 4,000 chests.¹¹

They were destined to expand by a still greater multiple in the decades to come. If demand was stimulated by opium’s foreign mystique, its suppliers were eager to oblige. By the time of the Jiaqing Emperor’s 1813 prohibition decree, opium had come to be cultivated commercially in China, but this was confined to remote regions such as the far western Xinjiang or southwestern Yunnan. Domestic production remained negligible.¹² The overwhelming share of China’s opium came from India. Under the Mughals, opium had been traded freely and sold for export to local, Dutch, Portuguese or British traders.¹³ After the conquest of Bengal, this had increasingly fallen under British control, though it was not until 1773 that Governor General Warren Hastings had placed the opium supply under the monopoly of the East India Company. The idea was simply to milk the revenues from it for the Presidency of Bengal. A contractor bought the opium from the cultivators, then sold it to the government, who auctioned it on to private traders. After 1797 the contractor was eliminated and replaced by a government agency.¹⁴

The scale and complexity of the operations involved should remove any doubt that the trade run by the East India Company was anything but a consciously elaborated, profit-oriented enterprise. Bengal opium was cultivated in two geographical areas. (The poppy was also grown elsewhere in India, where the product was designated as ‘Malwa’, but for a while the lion’s share went to ‘Bengal’.) The first area was centred around Patna and the second around Ghazipur, both upriver on the Ganges from Calcutta. Two Bengal agencies, one for each region, sat atop a multi-level hierarchy involving British administrators, local agents, the landed aristocracy, village leaders and poppy farmers. The farmer was legally bound to sell to the company and forbidden to sell elsewhere. Sowing was completed by November, and by late January the poppy was in bloom. Harvesting required skill: the farmer incised the plant’s pod at exactly the right depth to let out its white juice while ensuring it neither hardened nor got lost. He or she then sun-dried that juice for several days, letting it coagulate and turn brown. In April or May, after the harvest, farmers and agents took the opium to rural collection centres.15

The Bengal agencies sold opium for distribution in India itself in the shape of rough bricks. The Chinese consumer, however, was reckoned to have finer tastes. Transportation by sea required that the product be kept in a moist state to maintain quality. It also needed to be free from adulteration and to carry proof of origin. It was accordingly processed for export in what became two vast factories in Patna and Ghazipur. After the opium had arrived and been weighed and checked for impurities, craftsmen began turning out ‘cakes’ or balls of opium approximately the size of a cannonball. Each ball was rolled into dried stems and poppy leaves and placed in a round, earthenware cup of the right size. This was a delicate task: each ‘caker’ was able to turn out no more than six cakes a day. Next, during August and September, the cakes were placed on high racks to dry out. This too was labour-intensive: to ensure that drying took place evenly, each cake was given a one-quarter turn once every six days. After that, the workers began to prepare the mango-wood chests in which the opium balls would be packed: fitted with compartments for forty balls, sealed with gum and covered in burlap, these were stamped with the East India Company’s mark. At last, after another three months, the chests were ready to be shipped downriver to Calcutta for auction. At their peak, the ‘Sudder’ factories, as they were called, of Patna and Ghazipur would each employ more than a thousand workers. During drying season, the racks, designed to hold tens of thousands of balls, were stacked from floor to ceiling, their upper shelves reachable only with a tall ladder.16

Save for one ill-fated attempt in 1781, the East India Company never handled the opium trade into China directly. Rather, the chests were sold to private merchants locally licensed as ‘country’ traders, who shipped it out in their own name or on behalf of co-investors. The company was well aware that opium was a forbidden article at destination, and this system provided it with plausible deniability.

The Qing authorities channelled all their European trade through Canton, where it came under the supervision of the provincial and city governors and the inspector of customs or Hoppo. All authorized trade was performed through a select group of Chinese merchants named the Hong. The East India Company carried out a significant amount of business in Canton, involving both the sale of articles other than opium, such as raw cotton, and the purchase of Chinese goods, especially tea. Indeed, until 1834 it held a monopoly on the British trade with China – the India ‘country’ traders forming an exemption. Until that date, the company also retained control over the Canton residences, known as ‘factories’, where the foreigners stayed. This enabled it to discipline, if needed, the private traders on whom it relied to sell opium. In turn, the ‘country’ traders sought to escape that supervision, the more freely to engage in the illicit trade. They discovered, for example, the trick of registering as consuls for third-party countries in nearby Macao (then a Portuguese colony). James Matheson, for example, at one point represented Denmark and Thomas Dent Sardinia, while others allegedly stood for Prussia, Hamburg or Poland.¹⁷

The charade continued at payment time. Beyond Canton runs an expanding delta filled with islands of differing sizes, and it was off these islands that the opium was unloaded, not in the city itself, where it would have been too dangerous to do so. Business dealings, however, took place at the factories or in nearby streets. There, the merchants contracted opium sales with Chinese brokers. The broker paid upfront, in silver, and received a delivery order exchangeable for opium down-river. The merchant in turn took the silver to the British factory and obtained a company bill for it. The bill could be exchanged for coin or goods back in India. The company used the silver to buy tea and other articles from the Hong.¹⁸

The Jiaqing Emperor’s anti-drug offensive began to make itself felt, in the south, from 1815. It first struck at Macao. The authorities took sixteen Chinese dealers into custody, and Portuguese ships were henceforth ordered to submit to cargo searches by local officers.19 As to Canton, at some point the opium merchants had become so bold as to move their unloading all the way up to Whampoa, a village on a flat island close to shore a mere 20 kilometres (12 mi.) from the city. The Canton governor and the Hoppo warned the Hong about such practices, who passed the message on to the East India Company. The company’s board of representatives on the ground, the ‘Supercargoes Committee’, seconded the warning. The merchants ignored it, declaring it a blatant attempt to extract ‘squeeze’ or corruption money from them. In 1821 the exasperated authorities laid charges of smuggling against the owners of four ships at Whampoa, impounded these, and told the men they could have their ships back when they moved out and pledged never to return. The smuggling trade moved further down the delta, to a more remote island named Lintin.²⁰

The foreign merchants may have thought they led dangerous lives – Charles Magniac called the campaign to move them from Whampoa ‘the hottest persecution we remember’ – but it was their Chinese buyers who took all the risk.²¹ It was they who took the opium to shore, refined it and distributed it inland. From the foreign clippers, they transferred the drug onto boats nicknamed ‘fast crabs’ and ‘scrambling dragons’: sleek craft built of bright, unpainted wood and designed for speed, combining sails and rows of oars and manned by up to sixty or seventy sailors. While evading the Chinese navy’s junks was their primary purpose, these boats were equipped for combat. Scrambling dragons and fast crabs were known to fire their guns at both patrolling authorities and rivals. When cornered, their sailors were ready for hand-to-hand fighting.²²

These buyers boiled down the opium to turn it into a more concentrated, smokeable product locally termed chandu.²³ Sometimes they sold the raw paste on. History does not record who the opium kingpins were on the Chinese side, but they must have existed. Some of the Hong probably participated in opium dealing, though the richest of them, a man of reputedly fabulous wealth named Howqua, is believed not to have engaged in it.²⁴ The evidence nevertheless attests to the role of wealthy single buyers or buyer syndicates. On its own, operating such equipment as the fast crabs and dragons required significant capital. Just one chest of opium was an expensive item, equivalent to $10,000 or more in today’s money, and Jardine Matheson’s accounts show individual buyers paying for hundreds of chests over short periods.25

Gangs, possibly involved in other forms of crime, took the drug further inland. There, as do modern drug dealers, their members and underlings faced the risk of getting caught – and the penalty of transportation or death – and of assault from rivals or extortionists. According to a local administrator, hundreds of ‘brigands’ belonging to secret societies banded together to pursue the trade in the regions of Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, which stood on the route northward.²⁶ Gangs of opium dealers were reported to run the routes around Shanghai and Suzhou, off the Yangtze, their boats fitted with fire cannons to dissuade the police from investigating them.²⁷ At least one ‘mutual aid’ society dedicated to opium peddlers and dealers is known to have existed among the minority Hakka population inhabiting the key area between Fujian, Guangdong and inland Jiangxi. Members of this ‘Red Society’ wore little red or green woollen buttons as a mark and hid their wares in bags of salt. Reports estimated that the organization comprised between 20,000 and 30,000 men, all reputed to be ‘fierce and carry daggers’ and be too dangerous to arrest.²⁸

Beyond the main routes, finally, distribution networks tapered into a myriad of smaller undertakings and individual dealers: smalltime peddlers who, when arrested, would claim to have been offered their opium by unnamed ‘Canton strangers’.²⁹ One of them whose record has survived was the unemployed provincial Zhang Rui. Zhang had moved to Beijing to open a fish shop just inside the city’s northern gate. On a visit to his home city of Tianjin, he made the acquaintance of a boatman dealing in raw opium and ‘came up with the idea of selling it in order to fish for profit’. He purchased around 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of raw opium and carried it back to his shop in the capital. Together with an assistant, Wang Yongde, he processed the opium into smokeable paste. The men also invested in opium paraphernalia in the hope of selling it on the side. A few months later, old friends and family who were engaged in the fish and various other trades came to the shop ‘to discuss the prevailing price of fish’. But just as they were sitting down, officials came for an inspection and discovered the opium, porcelain bowls and bamboo pipes. Six were arrested, though only Zhang and Wang were found guilty of opium dealing. Both men confessed and asked for mercy, insisting that they had sold the drug only this one time. They were both sentenced to strangulation.30 It was such petty or desperate social climbers who, at most risk to themselves, stood at the end of the long chain that began in the Ganges plain around Patna and Ghazipur.

As the fishmongers’ case attests, the Qing authorities again upped the penalties to the maximum for opium dealing and eventually for smoking itself.

By 1813 imported opium volumes had risen to around 5,000 chests per annum.³¹ This comprised a majority of East India Company ‘Bengal’, a smaller quantity of opium grown elsewhere in India or ‘Malwa’, and a dribble from places further afield such as Turkey. As of 1820 volumes remained at approximately the same level. Thereafter, however, they began to climb steeply. Within five years, the opium imported into Canton and Macao had passed the 10,000 chest mark. By the 1830–31 trading season, this had doubled again. Volumes flattened for a few years until 1834–5, but doubled yet again in the following five years, to the unheard-of number of 40,000 chests in 1838–9.³² At this level, consumption stood at 3.75 kilograms (8.3 lb) per thousand population.³³ For comparison, in England and Wales, per-thousand opium consumption was 1.2 kilograms (2.6 lb).³⁴

Did prohibition itself contribute to this dizzying rise? By increasing the risks attendant on drug dealing, hard penalties increase the rewards demanded by those sufficiently foolhardy to engage in it. The terrible prospect of transportation or death discourages competition. The high margins inherent to smuggling in turn encourage peddlers to push drugs aggressively on customers, providing free samples and other inducements to get them hooked. Demand for addictive products being price-inelastic, margins hold up, inducing yet more participants into the trade as the user population expands. A collection of judicial cases prosecuted between 1816 and 1820 reveal that, in one province, the wholesale price of a tael (37.5 grams, or 1.3 oz) of crude opium was 0.86 silver taels. This placed the price of refined opium at 1.3 silver taels after accounting for the reduction in weight from boiling. The street value of a tael of refined opium, meanwhile, fluctuated around 1.8 silver taels.³⁵ The street dealer thus stood to make 0.5 silver tael for each 1.3 tael invested, a quick 40 per cent return.

This wholesale price itself translated into $1,800 per chest. But Pearl River estuary prices averaged just below $1,000 in that period, helping make the wholesaler $800 per chest. The total mark-up from disembarkation to end customer was thus close to 2.5 times – sizeable for such a cheaply transportable product.36 In addition, this did not take into account the profit the foreign merchant himself was making. This is a rough extrapolation from a few cases, but the Qing judicial archives are filled with records of small traders making a quick buck, or a quick tael, from opium when business was too hard in their own trade. Such operations could flourish from humble origins:

Ling Yashang of Panyu county organized an opium partnership of four men, each partner initially contributing twenty Mexican silver dollars. When profits began to soar, they expanded to thirteen partners and branched out into the opium den business. After a while Ling grew apprehensive, lest the partnership draw the attention of the authorities. So, as he and his partners later testified, he suggested that they organize ‘a gang of protectors who would gather together into a mob to curse [and obstruct investigators] while we made a quick getaway. This would make it difficult for the magistrate’s men to pursue us. We agreed that we would [pay] the protectors an average wage of one silver dollar each.’The protection gang numbered thirty-two local men, most of whom the partners ‘knew very well’.³⁷

Prohibition on its own nevertheless cannot be blamed for the tenfold increase in opium sales between 1815 and 1839. After all, dealing itself had at least nominally been forbidden since 1729 without causing such a rapid increase. It was the punishment of smokers that was the great novelty of the 1813 edict – together with a tougher enforcement programme – and this was not likely to stimulate demand.

A second explanation is cultural and has to do with an extension of the same trends that had caused opium’s original adoption in the eighteenth century. From 1800 the drug spilled further into the interior and its numerous urban centres. Having achieved status through consumption by the commercial and administrative elites, it began to be picked up by the less well-off.³⁸ Qing China’s population was exploding: from 150 million up to 300 million in 1800, and 400 million by 1840.³⁹ For a long while China had enjoyed a parallel economic boom, but by the early nineteenth century this was flagging, and with it the ability to feed and keep prosperous such large numbers of people. Access to the magistracy – the imperial elite – took place by examination, and the number of places, kept roughly constant, accounted for a tiny proportion of the aspiring population.40 Improving or even keeping one’s social rank, whether within the commercial or titled classes, was becoming more difficult. Addictive behaviours, including opium smoking, may well have followed from rising economic anxieties and social frustrations.

More generally, opium entrenched its position within Qing material culture and sociability. This would become more frankly discernible later in the century, but opium smoking became a part of Chinese hospitality, male companionship and celebratory rituals. Even if it were recognized as a dangerous article, opium achieved a sufficient decree of desirability to become, or almost become, a staple. That its progress was specific to Chinese culture in the period is tentatively borne out by patterns elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In places such as Cambodia, Vietnam or Burma (now Myanmar) later in the century – when surveys became available – opium smokers were proportionally far more numerous among the Chinese than among host populations.⁴¹ This may have merely reflected greater levels of wealth and urbanization, but it is also worth noting that India had long been the site of opium-taking among a variety of social classes, yet the drug never spread there to the same extent as in China.⁴²

The third culprit for opium’s meteoric rise, of course, is supply. The Chinese opium market expanded because the East India Company was primed, willy-nilly, to feed increasing volumes into it. This assertion is borne out by observable price trends within the period.⁴³ From around $1,900 in 1820–21, when the steep increase in volumes began, the price of a chest of Bengal (at Pearl River estuary rates) fell all the way to $570 in 1834–5, remaining around that low until the end of the decade. When accused, back home, of being merchants of death, the British traders replied that they were only supplying an article the Chinese demanded. The fall in prices actually points to a glut, suggesting that the expansion in China’s opium consumption was at least partly supply-led.

The chronological detail within the period is equally damning: most of the fall in prices took place in the 1820s, when volumes approximately quadrupled. When quantities delivered reached a brief plateau between 1830 and 1832, prices likewise stalled around a level of $900. They then resumed their plunge as the trade doubled again in size. Both rises in volume were thus accompanied by price declines. Had supply lagged demand, one would have expected to see rising, not falling prices. As will be seen, both the company and the ‘country’ traders engaged, in the 1820s and ’30s, in specific actions accounting for these patterns.

The trigger for the 1813 opium decree was the emperor’s discovery that opium smoking had progressed all the way into the Forbidden City itself. The edict began: ‘This severely prohibits opium smoking, as recently many officials, civilians, court eunuchs and palace guards have been intoxicated with opium smoking, undermining social customs and moral norms.’44 Another unwelcome discovery may have moved the emperor to action: Prince Minning, his son and successor, had himself experimented with opium. The evidence is a set of verses written by the prince sometime between 1799 and 1813, exalting smoking with a ‘hollow pipe’ mounted with a copper head and tail and sporting an ‘eye’, characteristics that belonged solely to the opium pipe. ‘It is the first sunny day after a spring snow, the sun and the wind in the garden and the trees are beautiful. I have nothing to do except reading and studying history. Bored and tired, I ask the servant to prepare yan and a pipe to inhale. Each time, my mind suddenly becomes clear, my eyes and ears refreshed.’⁴⁵ We do not know whether the Jiaqing Emperor was told any of this, but twenty years later the missionary Charles Gutzlaff came across the story, in the vicinity of Tianjin, that ‘in consequence of the heir of the crown having died by opium smoking, very severe edicts had been published against the use of the drug.’⁴⁶ If there was a kernel of truth to this, it would not be the last time parental fears acted as a prop to drug prohibition.

The campaign against opium nevertheless proceeded from deep-seated causes. Qing motives for fighting opium ultimately sprang from public-health concerns. Imperial rule was rooted in a long tradition of Confucian paternalism, and it was exercised primarily through a mandarinate steeped in classical ideals of good governance. This involved looking after the population’s moral and material welfare.

Certainly the Qing Chinese were aware that opium put its users at risk of becoming dependent. By the early nineteenth century the word yin had emerged to describe the craving for opium. In 1831 a censor named Liu Guangsan described yin as an illness contracted from extended opium smoking that was fatal if not ‘satisfied’ at the proper time.47 Earlier, the poet Yu Jiao had written: ‘If one smokes regularly, it will affect the heart and spleen. If one becomes ill after not smoking for a single day, this condition is called yin. When the yin comes, the nose and eyes start to run, whereas the hands and the feet become stiff and clenched. It feels like facing a dagger while a tiger is chasing one from behind – fearful yet unable to surrender. A chronic opium smoker ends up with shrunken shoulders and neck; his face becomes wan and he is without energy, just like a sick person.’⁴⁸ Reports are that common people asked visiting doctors to wean them from opium, and mandarins listed pills and elixirs used to combat the habit, proving that it was widely recognized as such.⁴⁹ In 1810 the emperor himself exclaimed: ‘Opium has a most intense effect. Those who smoke it can suddenly become excited and capable of doing whatever they want without restraint. Before long, it will steal their life and kill them.’⁵⁰

Related to these health concerns were fears that opium use and its trafficking would rock the social order. Opium enriched criminal gangs, therefore it had to be suppressed – the court failing to see that it was prohibition that benefited the gangs. Part of Qing ideal governance was moreover that it should rest lightly on the taxpayer. The government establishment was thin on the ground: the civil bureaucracy on the statute books totalled only around 20,000 officials. These administrators employed private secretaries and hired clerks and runners locally, but they lacked a separate budget for them.⁵¹ The police force itself, known as the Green Standard Army, was poorly equipped to deal with the well-armed syndicates of the criminal underworld. For urban surveillance, it could tap into such sources as temple keepers, harbourmasters and innkeepers, who kept tabs on travellers, recording names, professions and what they carried with them. This helped nab petty offenders. Beyond this, though, numbers were too few. Enforcement required the cooperation of local social networks and elites, the village headman or the local squire.⁵² The Qing hoped to enlist such support by being seen to hold the moral high ground, and this translated, in the case of opium, into interdiction. Paradoxically, the severity of penalties compensated for weak enforcement capacity, accounting for the court’s increasingly desperate measures.

The fear of drug-fuelled banditry was meanwhile no shibboleth. There was always a thin line between banditry and political rebellion. Crime syndicates were apt to blend into the secret societies liable to foment popular uprisings. A White Lotus insurgency uniting northeastern peasants with urban workers had defied the authorities for ten years between 1794 and 1805, and it had only been defeated after local elites were encouraged to raise their own militias. The preceding dynasty, the Ming, had fallen to just such a rebellion in the seventeenth century. In 1813 another sect carried out a daring raid on the Forbidden City in an attempt to assassinate the emperor, reaching the palace’s inner sanctum before it was stopped.53

Complicating the court’s dilemma, finally, was the issue of corruption. Beijing feared that the magistrates themselves would become addicts, further impairing an already thinly spread administration. Conversely, however, the profits from dealing risked feeding bribery, especially on the lower administrative rungs. In the 1820s and ’30s higher-ranking officials proved time and again ready to enforce antiopium legislation, no matter how much they stood to gain by not doing so. While major corruption scandals, particularly involving palace eunuchs, did shake the Qing empire in this period, it is far from clear that the mandarinate itself was corrupt as a rule. Yet these high-ranking magistrates, lacking sufficient budgets, depended on expedients to pay the salaries of their lower-level staff or on allowing them to raise their own compensation.⁵⁴ If this involved closing their eyes to opium abuse by a village headman or a squire’s dependant, or taking money from a coastal syndicate rather than confront it, with all the cost in men and silver this entailed, then so be it.⁵⁵

By 1830 the Daoguang Emperor, who had now succeeded his father, became again alarmed. ‘The multitude of users expands day by day, and there are more and more people who sell it; they are like fire and smoke, destroying our resources and harming our people. Each day is worse than the last,’ he wrote.⁵⁶ Two matters were judged most disturbing: the prevalence of opium smoking in the administration itself, and the news that opium was being cultivated in China, not just imported. (There had been isolated actions against domestic cultivators in Fujian and Zhejiang in the 1820s.⁵⁷) The emperor urged the metropolitan censorate, the mandarinate’s supervisory body, to intensify operations against opium throughout the empire. Bonds certifying that no drug offences had occurred in their constituency were to be filled by local officials annually. In 1831 a new decree instituted penalties against the cultivation and the decoction of crude opium into paste, making them the same as for trafficking: transportation to the military frontier.58

None of this stemmed the tide. On the contrary, the failures and contradictions of prohibition were starting to become apparent. The first to notice its dysfunctions were frontline officials. In 1834 a Canton scholar named Wu Lanxiu alerted his superiors to the counterproductive role of the anti-opium laws. Its illegality, not opium itself, was helping corrupt the administration. ‘The stricter the laws, the larger the bribes,’ Wu wrote. The imperial bureaucracy simply lacked the power to suppress opium by force of law. The obsession with punishment was misguided, he opined, and it would be better to legalize and tax the drug.⁵⁹

Eventually, in 1836, the government invited proposals for fresh solutions, writing to a number of upper-echelon members of the provincial administration. The debate it thereby initiated ran on, through various memorials, for five months. Both sides carefully considered prohibition’s impact on public health, the administration and enforcement. (China’s enemies used the debate to argue that the drain in silver caused by the sizeable opium imports was the court’s real concern.⁶⁰ The matter also arose, but that it was paramount is easily dismissed. If the negative trade balance had been the problem, there was a ready solution: legalize opium cultivation within China. The emperor had done the very opposite in 1831.)

Xu Naiji, a sub-director of the Court of Sacrificial Worship, was the first Beijing official to argue that it was not possible to suppress opium. Prohibition had done nothing to halt the spread of the drug. The government should focus on harm mitigation instead. Xu trod carefully around the risks presented by the suppression of opium imports. Faced with more forceful interdiction, he warned, the foreigners would simply move their ships further away from shore. They would always find customers because the locals were moved by the large profits smuggling offered. Xu admitted that ‘the habit of using [opium] being inveterate, is destructive of time, injurious to property, and yet dear to one even as life.’ While it was advisable to dismiss any soldiers or administrators who smoked opium, it was nevertheless best to control the trade as a whole through regulation.⁶¹ Xu’s legalization proposal was seconded by Deng Tingzhen, governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi. A local administrator, he understood from experience the costs and risks of interdiction. These were balanced by risks to public health, including to the mandarinate itself, but ultimately opium policing threatened to stretch the empire’s authority more than toleration. Deng began to draft a list of regulations, thinking the court was about to change its mind.

The problem was that the case for prohibition was more simply made. It is always easier to paint intoxicants as bad, while defending them relies on complex arguments about freedom of choice, lesser evils and the self-defeating nature of bans. An example of the opposition’s case is provided by Zhu Zun, a member of the Board of Rites. Opium cultivation, if legalized, would drive valuable food crops from the best lands, he began. The military would fall to the spreading habit, and the empire would become impossible to defend. But Zhu’s argumentation centred on the drug, not the question of prohibition. His line was typical of Confucian tenets: ‘To sum up the matter – the wide-spreading and baneful influence of opium, when regarded simply as injurious to property [that is, the silver drain], is of inferior importance; but when regarded as hurtful to the people, it demands most anxious consideration: for in the people lies the very foundation of the empire.’62 Powerful figures arose on both sides of the discussion, but another notable stance is that of Lin Zexu, destined to become the empire’s opium tsar three years later. Lin supported heavy penalties on users and traffickers alike, and he proposed to suppress the foreign supply. He also wished to institute a programme of public education and medical care: Richard Nixon, when he launched his own war on drugs in 1970, would devise a similar plan.⁶³ As the immediate upshot, nevertheless, both Zhu and Lin blamed past failures on weaknesses in enforcement.

While leaving the debate open, the emperor decided to test the waters with stricter policing in Canton. In 1837–8 anti-trafficking operations launched in that province resulted in the capture of 692 offenders. The authorities confiscated 5 tons of crude. These were not major seizures in regard to total volumes, but they looked like progress. The court reopened the debate in 1838 based on a proposal by Huang Juezi, a minister of rites, for a campaign of ruthless suppression. Opium cultivation, refining, trafficking and warehousing would all be punished by decapitation, this recommended. ‘The head of the offender shall then be stuck upon a pole, and exposed upon the seacoast as a warning to all.’ All those who grew opium, transported it, or paid or received opium-related bribes would be subject to the maximum penalty. As to opium smokers, they would be allowed a year to kick the habit. After that, they would face death by strangulation.64

The memorial was circulated for opinions within the same restricted circle. Out of 29 senior scholars, 21 came out in favour of sparing the user from the worst penalty, reserving death for traffickers only.⁶⁵ Prohibition had nevertheless come out on top. The emperor decided to go ahead with Huang’s proposal in full. The regulations were promulgated in June 1839, the grace period for opium smokers to give up the drug before the death penalty applied being extended to eighteen months. Clamping down domestically, though, would not be enough. The foreign merchants would also have to be confronted.

The trade routes out of the Indian Ocean, temporarily disrupted during the Napoleonic Wars, reopened after 1815. The East India Company had absorbed another chunk of the Indian peninsula, between 1803 and 1818, in the second and third Maratha Wars. British India nevertheless remained a patchwork, with company territories bordering on nominally autonomous principalities, plus a sprinkling of Portuguese-held coastal enclaves functioning as independent exit points. Such was the background to the expansion of Malwa opium, whose exports received a dramatic impulse from 1815 into the 1820s.

The company’s Bengal monopoly, by maximizing the margin between prices paid to growers, which it kept low, and the export price, which was set by auction, created an irresistible incentive to independent cultivation elsewhere. The British military forces lacked the capacity to police either Malwa poppy growers or the opium caravans that filed through the Indian states to be smuggled out of Bombay or Portuguese Daman and Diu. The company might offer a pension to the Maharana of Udaipur for clamping down on transit, or sign treaties with the Majarajahs of Indore or Holkar for restricting cultivation: they were scarcely worth more than the paper they were written on.⁶⁶ The traffic could always move elsewhere, as could the poppy fields.

Malwa exports to China, at an average of 1,100 chests in the mid-1810s, had doubled by the 1819–20 season.⁶⁷ Initially the authorities in Calcutta had merely prohibited sales out of Bombay. As it became clear that the trade had only moved as a result, and continued to expand, they decided to change tactics. Their concern was not for the Chinese customer, though there was always the fear that as smuggling into China grew, it would provoke a reaction threatening the trade in legal goods. The annoyance was rather that rising supply caused Bengal prices to fall, affecting the company’s receipts. After the Maratha Wars were over, it was therefore decided to sweep up the Malwa opium, which the company itself would buy for resale. The margins on that would be low, but at least this would help push Bengal prices up again. The result, predictably, was merely another explosion in supply. By 1823–4 the company was again confronted with failure: Malwa exports now stood at 5,500 chests.68 This was when the idea was tried of signing up the Indian princes to suppression in exchange for payment: this too only acted as an incentive, and volumes rose once more, to 7,700 chests in the 1828–9 season. It was a sorcerer’s apprentice experience. From 1831 the company gave up on suppressing the trade, opening Bombay again for transit and imposing a fee instead.⁶⁹

The opium trade remained at that time the responsibility of a few large firms plus a smattering of independent individuals (although because these firms operated on consignment, they stood at the tip of a pyramid of investors based in India and Britain). Most merchants were British-born, but there were also a number of Indian houses, the largest of them hailing from the Parsee community of Bombay. Finally, a handful of Americans were involved in the trade, selling either Turkish opium or Bengal/Malwa purchased through third-party Calcutta brokers. The main British firms were Jardine, Matheson & Co. (originally Magniac & Co.) and Dent & Co., but it is also worth mentioning the traders James Innes and Hugh Hamilton Lindsay. Key Parsee families included the Jejeebhoys and Cowasjees. Among the Americans, Russell & Co. was the largest. Several of the Americans present in Canton refused to deal in opium, notably Olyphant & Co., which was run by Charles King, and Nathan Dunn.⁷⁰

The old city of Canton, girthed in a sandstone-and-brick crenellated wall, was encircled by sprawling suburbs. Southwards, its muddy riverfront was forever densely crowded with boats and ships of all kinds. Squeezed between that embankment and the suburbs, no more than 300 metres wide but towering over the low, wooden Chinese houses, stood a row of buildings built of granite and brick, with European-style columned verandas and terraces. The thirteen factories, run by Chinese stewards and servants, combined living quarters, warehouses and offices for the use of the foreign traders. Long reserved for the East India Company, the British factory was the most imposing. Rogues lodged elsewhere, such as the Danish factory or the Creek, at the tip of the enclave.

James Innes had always scorned authority, even the authority of the East India Company and its Select Committee of Supercargoes in Canton. When he arrived in the mid-1820s he did not even bother with the pretence of a consular commission and simply settled at the Creek factory without permission.71 In 1835, on his way to the Hoppo’s post, he was attacked by a kitchen coolie holding a chopper. Though Innes was not hurt, his reaction was to fire rockets from his veranda, setting the custom post on fire. When the committee revoked his ‘country’ licence in response, he simply applied for a new one in Calcutta.⁷²

Relations with the Hong, through whom all the official trade passed – whether in tea, silks, porcelain, cotton or other goods – were consistently friendly. Since none of the foreign merchants spoke Chinese, business was conducted via interpreters or in Pidgin English, a local language mixing English with a few Hindi and Portuguese words set to a simple Chinese grammar. Numbering ten or so families, the Hong went by the anglicized name of their original or leading member, such as the odd-sounding Howqua, Mowqua or Puankequa. They acted as buffer between the merchants and local officials, who could be fastidious: moving up and down the river between Canton and the estuary required permits or ‘chops’, and there were pilotage, harbour, customs and other fees to negotiate, all of which the Hong could be counted on to facilitate. They were even known to invite their foreign partners to their river or country villas and gardens for relaxation.⁷³

The unspoken agreement was that the foreigners would never go too far to provoke the authorities, in whose line of fire the Hong were the first to stand. But in 1838, at a time when enforcement was becoming increasingly serious, Innes had crates of opium unloaded from a boat moored just outside the factory, in the middle of Canton. If the 1821 experiment to set up Whampoa, 20 kilometres away, as an opium hub had been provocative, this was downright reckless. Innes’s coolies were caught, but besides naming him, they wrongfully implicated an American merchant and his ship, the Thomas Perkins, which carried rice. Innes did nothing to clear the matter up.

The Hong merchant standing security for the Thomas Perkins was named Punhoyqua. The Canton governor general summoned all eleven Hong representatives and, asking for the culprits to be brought to justice, forced Punhoyqua into the humiliation of the cangue. The Hong in turn protested to Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, who was chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, but Lindsay explained that he had no authority over Innes, who was not a member. Hoping to send a message, the authorities set up a wooden cross outside the factories for strangling a convicted (Chinese) opium dealer. Innes and Lindsay, leading a group of foreigners, intervened physically to dismantle the scaffold. The incident threatened to spin out of control. The official in charge of the execution pulled back, but an angry crowd arrived from the town, and a flinging match began. The resident aliens were thrown back into the factories, which were about to be stormed. Just in time, soldiers from the Canton garrison rushed in and cleared the square. Innes eventually left for Macao.74

In 1834, for reasons to do with British domestic politics, the East India Company’s monopoly over the China trade was terminated. This was to invite a whole host of men in the mould of James Innes. What minimal controls still existed were lifted. In 1831 there had been five British firms and a dozen individuals in China, plus the Parsees.⁷⁵ Five years later, 150 British nationals were doing business at the factories.⁷⁶

After the regularization of Malwa, the termination of the company monopoly was the second major change in practices to boost opium deliveries. It presided over the final spurt in volumes between then and the end of the decade. Yet more inflammatory, as new entrants arrived, the established houses began to move up the Chinese coast to unauthorized landing places. In 1832 the company itself had launched an exploratory journey north with a ship full of cotton textiles under the direction of Lindsay, who at the time had yet to set himself up privately.⁷⁷ The opium clippers followed: in 1833 Jardine Matheson sent the Colonel Young on its own exploratory trip along Fujian, stopping off at Quanzhou and selling opium to the tune of the then fabulous sum of a third of a million dollars. By 1837 Russell had the Rose cruising off Namoa island, in Guangdong province, along with Jardine Matheson’s Governor Finlay and Dent’s Omega. They waited for an official to arrive, whom they proceeded to pay off before unloading.⁷⁸

Like the twentieth-century drug lords Pablo Escobar or El Chapo, the opium merchants were for the most part men of modest or middling origins who turned out to do extremely well financially. William Jardine was a Scot who originally came to China in 1802 as a surgeon’s mate aboard a Company ship. On the side, Jardine traded on his own account, as was common in his position. He had settled in Canton in 1817 and in 1825 joined the established firm Magniac and Co. Jardine was joined by James Matheson, another Scot who had begun in a London trading house, then moved to Calcutta. When Magniac went home, the firm was renamed Jardine, Matheson & Co.79 By the 1830s it was the largest of the traders in opium, alongside the other goods it bought and sold, running twelve ships of varying tonnage.⁸⁰

Thomas Dent was the third son of a well-to-do merchant from Westmoreland. After dropping out of Cambridge in 1815, he moved to Canton, where he was employed as a manager by a firm named W. S. Davidson. After Davidson’s retirement, Dent became his firm’s senior partner, and by 1824 he had changed its name to Thomas Dent & Co. His brother Lancelot, who replaced him in 1830, went on to build the family enterprise into the second-largest British firm in China.⁸¹ Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy was born in 1773 to a family with a Parsee priestly background. Originally apprenticed to an uncle living in Bombay, he began his career as a hawker and peddler, collecting and selling empty bottles. Jejeebhoy made various voyages to China, on the second of which he carried borrowed goods worth up to 40,000 rupees (around $16,000). On one of these trips, he was captured alongside William Jardine by a French frigate, helping forge a long-lasting connection with the future Jardine Matheson. In 1814 he had become wealthy enough to purchase his own ship, the Good Success, and he acquired several more between 1818 and 1832.⁸²

‘We are not smugglers, gentlemen! It is the Chinese government, it is the Chinese officers who smuggle, and who connive at and encourage smuggling, not we,’ proclaimed Jardine at a banquet in 1839.⁸³ Also like the later heroin or cocaine kings, he and his peers rarely exhibited much compunction for their actions. Jardine found the Chinese ‘a people so avaricious and faithless’ and ‘arrogant and unjust’ that they deserved only force.⁸⁴ His public writings were a compendium of the arguments exonerating the opium trade: that the Chinese ban was an excuse to extract bribes, that the government’s real concern was the silver drain, and that it was the consumer who was responsible for craving opium.85 ‘Our dealings with them have been marked by the most scrupulous performance of all our engagements and a strong desire to stand well with them,’ he found.⁸⁶ Matheson meanwhile saw the Chinese as ‘a people characterised by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit, and obstinacy’.⁸⁷ By contrast, his fellow merchants were distinguished by ‘a spirit of noble and persevering enterprise [that] led them to dare all dangers, to despise all difficulties’. Because China ‘monopolize[d] all the advantages of their situation’, moreover, the foreign community was authorized to force upon it whatever trading conditions it saw fit.⁸⁸ Nor was Jejeebhoy exempt from such belligerence: twice in the 1830s he and a group of Parsee merchants would draft petitions urging forceful action on the British government to stop Chinese interference in the opium trade.⁸⁹

The foreign residents in Canton chafed at local restrictions – foreign women were not allowed in the factories, for example – and at the procedures in place, such as the need to ask for permits before moving in and out of the city. In Britain it was felt that the Canton system (introduced by the Qing in 1757 in replacement of freer norms) was a hindrance to commerce. The preference was for selling manufactured goods into China rather than opium, however profitable the commodity was to British India. Missions had been sent to establish equal-footing diplomatic relations with China under George Macartney (1792–3) and William Amherst (1816–17), but both had ended dismal failures. All this was fodder for the opium traders’ aggressive instincts.

The presence of the vast, illegal opium trade, of course, was not calculated to encourage the Chinese authorities to loosen the rules. The opium traders were nevertheless skilled at recuperating third-party complaints to their own ends. In 1831 a set of visits to Canton by English and American ladies had triggered punishment in the form of the destruction of a shrubbery on the factories’ river side: a group of British merchants had written to Calcutta to ask for the dispatch of a squadron to China.⁹⁰ Upon the termination of the East India Company monopoly, the Foreign Office appointed a delegate to act in place of the old Committee of Supercargoes: Lord William Napier. Napier, who arrived in 1834, hoped to achieve the elevated aim of gaining diplomatic recognition. This mission, too, ended badly, as Napier fell ill and died in Macao in the same year. Matheson, who briefly returned home in 1835, obtained through Napier’s widow a meeting with the Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, again to request a punitive expedition.91 Lindsay went further in a published pamphlet asking that terms be imposed on the Chinese and suggesting precisely what size of force was to be employed: ‘one line-of-battle ship, two large frigates, six corvettes, and three or four armed steamers’, plus a landing force of six hundred soldiers.⁹²

Napier was briefly replaced by a succession of former company supercargoes, then in 1836 by a captain of the Royal Navy with a record of service against the slave trade: Charles Elliot. Awkwardly, the title of this representative without diplomatic status was superintendent of trade at Canton. In a letter to his wife, Elliot described the merchants as ‘a rapacious and ravenous race of wolves, each howling after their prey’.⁹³ As, from 1838, the Qing stepped up their fight against opium, he would become the intermediary between the wolves and the emperor’s enforcers.

In New York City’s Chinatown stands a statue of Commissioner Lin Zexu on a granite pedestal inscribed with the words: ‘Pioneer in the war against drugs’.⁹⁴ The inscription is entirely apposite.

Lin Zexu, already a high-level mandarin at the time of the 1836–8 legalization debate, had sided with the proponents of the strictest prohibition. Lin had been born in 1785 to a Fuzhou gentry family with a once glorious but now fading pedigree. He had quickly succeeded in passing the highest of the civil service examinations, becoming a jinshi scholar at a notably young age and going on to join the prestigious Hanlin Academy. His career had taken him through a number of provincial posts, first as salt and judicial commissioner in various jurisdictions, then as provincial governor in Jiangsu, Hubei and Hunan. An American who witnessed Lin’s arrival in Canton observed that he ‘had a dignified air, rather a harsh or firm expression, as a large corpulent man, with heavy black moustache and long beard’. A contemporary portrait shows him with a thin, luminous face and piercing eyes. Among his colleagues, Lin was known for his industry and his devotion to the people’s cause. But in addition to his efficiency as an administrator, he was reputed for his uprightness, his incorruptibility and, when it came to opium offenders, his inflexibility. ‘Lin the clear sky’ was recommended to the emperor for his probity, but also for energetic anti-opium campaigns run in Hunan and Hubei in 1838, in which he had had numerous dealers jailed and smoking implements destroyed in mass events.95

The emperor summoned Lin to the capital on 27 December 1838. Over the course of eight audiences, the two men locked themselves up to elaborate a new plan of suppression. Lin emerged from these meetings as China’s first opium tsar: an imperial commissioner ‘holding the power to act on Daoguang’s behalf, answerable to none’, wielding authority over Canton’s officials, and having control over both the police and the naval forces stationed there.⁹⁶

When, in the hiatus between the 1836 and 1838 debates, the emperor had ordered a renewal of enforcement, the task had paradoxically fallen to Deng Tingzhen – the Canton provincial governor but also one of the proponents of legalization. Whatever his private views, Deng had followed the emperor’s instructions with vigour. Off the coast, his agents chased down Chinese smugglers and destroyed their transport ships. Inland, they went after dealers and their supply lines. By December 1837 Deng could already report that he had made thirty seizures and arrested 161 offenders, having captured 9,688 taels of silver and 38 chests of opium. The opium had been burned. ‘Those brokerage houses found to be dealing in opium [have] been closed, while orders were issued for the apprehension of the persons who had frequented them.’⁹⁷ Chinese subjects were not the sole targets of these actions. Early on, Deng had ordered nine named foreign merchants, including Jardine, Dent and Innes, to pack up and leave Canton, giving them two weeks to do so. To drive the point home, Deng had ordered a local translator who had been caught smuggling opium to be paraded around the factories with the cangue. For good measure, he had an opium broker strangled outside St Antonio Gate before Macao.⁹⁸

The impact soon began to be felt on the trade. Local dealers began to ask for higher fees to compensate for the danger, cutting into profits. Many left the business or went idle. The fast crabs and scrambling dragons having been burned or scared away, it became increasingly difficult to unload product. ‘The drug market is becoming worse every day owing to the extreme vigilance of the Authorities,’ reported Jardine in November 1837.⁹⁹ As 1837 ran into 1838, opium slowly stopped moving. The foreigners tried to push more traffic up the coast, but though prices there were higher, volumes were lacking. In desperation, they began putting opium ashore themselves. They brought the drug among their effects on the small sailing vessels for carrying passengers from Macao. Their servants secreted opium in wine bottles or pickle jars and took it ashore. But there also they ran into the police. In January 1838 the authorities searched the Swift and, having found three chests of opium, fined her owner several thousand dollars. The next month they seized 23 chests from the Alpha.100 For now the penalties were only monetary, but how long could this last? Incidentally, Beijing’s campaign also resulted in significant seizures in the distant, western region of Xinjiang, into which opium was smuggled by a land route. In 1840 the neighbouring khan of Kokand would agree to endorse the imperial ban, while itinerant traders pledged to abandon the traffic.¹⁰¹

Deng upped the pressure further in 1838. Around the Pearl River estuary that year, he had locals arrested almost every day. In December Jardine was told that the Canton prisons were holding no fewer than 2,000 opium offenders. At Whampoa, aggravated villagers arose to fight a pitched battle with soldiers sent to make arrests. Prices fell as volumes sold dwindled further. Even at $350 a chest, almost half as cheap as at the beginning of the season, Russell & Co. found that it could not move the higher-quality Turkish product.¹⁰² Then the incident took place involving Innes’s attempt to offload his opium in broad daylight by the Creek factory, followed by the affray around the dismantled scaffold. Finding his patience at an end, Deng ordered a halt to the official trade. No silk, cotton or tea would move in or out of Canton as long as smuggling went on. Elliot was compelled to tell the merchants to remove their small craft from the river, and he informed Deng that they would receive no assistance from him if caught.¹⁰³

His conditions met, Deng reopened the trade in legal goods at the beginning of 1839. By then, though, Lin was emerging from his interviews with the emperor and heading south. As the news reached Canton, Lin’s reputation having preceded him, the opium business came to a complete standstill. The police were everywhere. Passenger boats refused to carry opium. Buyers vanished. On 27 February Russell & Co. threw in the towel and announced that it was withdrawing from the opium trade. The managers ordered their ships to stop selling along the coast and come in. A few of the smaller merchants had already quit handling the drug, and several more now followed.¹⁰⁴

Lin arrived in Canton on 10 March. He struck even harder. The commissioner had brought with him a list of 62 opium offenders, including local dealers, fast-crab operators and corrupt bureaucrats, and he promptly had them lined up. He would lock up six hundred examination candidates until they wrote down all they knew of the opium traffic, providing another roll call of names. Lin reproduced the eradication methods that had served him in Hubei and Hunan. He started with the mass arrest of local offenders. His men confiscated raw opium and pipes. To clamp down on the user population, he organized the city into ‘security groups’ of five people, each responsible for guaranteeing that none of the others were smokers. Within two months, he had arrested over 1,500 people, confiscated 230 chests (14 tons) of opium and destroyed 43,000 pipes.105

Simultaneously, on 18 March, Lin convoked the Hong. ‘Truly I burn with shame for you,’ he told them as they waited, kneeling. They had aided and abetted the foreigners in their illegal, poisonous trade, he thundered. They would be held responsible. ‘The Great Minister does not want your money. I want your head,’ Lin menaced Howqua. The Hong would pass on an injunction to the foreigners to surrender the opium aboard their ships – not just what might still be floating off the city of Canton, but any ship lying in or around the estuary, the full stock of what remained of the last Indian harvest. The merchants would also sign an undertaking to abandon the trade, on pain of death if it were violated. If this were not accepted within three days, Lin announced, he would execute two of the more notorious among the Hong and confiscate all their property.¹⁰⁶ Within the hour, the Hong had conveyed the written order to the factories. If anyone was hoping to slip away, they were disappointed. The next day, the Hoppo, who was responsible for issuing permits to foreigners for going to and from Canton, refused to authorize any departures.

It took three days for the forty-strong general meeting of the Chamber of Commerce to convene. The foreigners’ first instinct was to ignore the danger in which opium had placed both their Chinese counterparts and themselves. On 21 March the merchants decided, by a vote of 25 to 14, to leave the Hong in the lurch. Their response to Lin was that they would study his proposals and provide an answer within another six days.¹⁰⁷ The Hong were predictably upset. Their deadline expiring, they returned that night to press their British counterparts. A second Chamber of Commerce meeting was convened two hours before midnight. It was agreed to surrender a token amount of 1,000 chests. But the next day, word came back to the factories that this would not suffice. Perhaps 4,000 chests should be proposed.108 The foreigners still thought themselves untouchable, but amid the defiance, concern was setting in and nerves were fraying. It was dawning on everyone that the commissioner meant business.

Then Lin overplayed his hand. Victory was nigh. Perhaps this did not seem sufficient punishment at a time when Lin was finding himself forced to throw so many Chinese people into jail or even condemn them to death, but the foreign merchants were hurting where it counted: their business. Deng’s measures had already brought the opium trade to a halt. Lin’s campaign promised to deny it any hope of revival. Half of the last season’s opium remained unsold, floating around the estuary in the merchants’ ships, threatening catastrophic losses if it could not be offloaded. Jardine Matheson was finding itself forced to warehouse the drug all the way to Singapore. Prices, if they could still be computed, had fallen to ‘alarm’ rates of $300 for Bengal and $200 for Malwa, less than half their decade low.¹⁰⁹ This was also less than what had been paid in Calcutta: $497 per chest, even without accounting for transport and other costs. But the worst was that back in India, the big firms and their investors had kept buying. It had been another bumper crop, and the product of the 1838 harvest was beginning to arrive in bulk, exceeding on its own the unsold excess. Mass bankruptcies beckoned. Even the East India Company was in trouble. At the May 1839 Calcutta auction, bids collapsed to a low of $79, almost 50 per cent below its long-run manufacturing cost.¹¹⁰

The Chinese officials in Canton had learnt from experience that it was dangerous to confront the Europeans with force. It was understood, at the very least, that the Chinese navy was not equipped to chase their ships beyond the Canton river system. Lin issued around the same time a proclamation framed as a letter to the Queen of England which showed that he believed, erroneously of course, that opium was illegal in Britain. (The letter was never transmitted, but it is possible that Queen Victoria read it, as it was later published in The Times.¹¹¹) This belief may have deepened his indignation. In any case, Lin at last threw caution to the wind. He resolved he must obtain satisfaction on his terms.

Faced with their procrastination, the commissioner announced that the time had come to call in the opium merchants themselves. Jardine had departed for England a couple of months before and so had Lindsay, and Lin’s choice fell on Lancelot Dent. Dent was actually not the most brazen of the merchants. He had always been respectful of the East India Company’s authority. The newspaper he funded, the Canton Press, was perhaps surprisingly prepared to be critical of opium, acknowledging the ‘evil moral and physical consequences to the habitual opium-smoker’.112 Dent had also founded a school for Chinese boys in Macao, which in the words of his biographer ‘fostered, in a modest way, greater mutual understanding between Chinese and Western cultures’.¹¹³

On 22 March the Scot was nevertheless ordered to come into the city for questioning. Resigned or possibly inured to his danger, he was preparing to surrender himself when a colleague pointed out that there was a precedent. In 1760 an Englishman named James Flint had been thrown into jail, on the lesser crime of having tried to learn Chinese, for a long, hard stint that had almost certainly foreshortened his life. Dent changed his mind and refused to go.¹¹⁴ Nothing after that would make him budge. The next day, the two Hong leaders Howqua and Mowqua appeared at the factories wearing iron chains around their necks. They cried that they were about to be strangled. Later, three mandarins appeared in Dent’s lodgings to pick him up, settling in an adjacent office. It was night-time and Dent came down to offer them, sarcastically, dinner and beds.¹¹⁵ The stand-off between China and Britain, and with it two centuries of the war on drugs, hung on the will of two men.

Lin still hesitated to use force. He nevertheless gave the green light for the next, fateful step. That evening, 24 March, the Chinese servants all began to leave the factories. A cordon of soldiers deployed around the compound, encircling it. As was being made clear, the foreigners would not be allowed to leave until they had complied with Lin’s demand for the opium on their ships.¹¹⁶

For several weeks, roughly 350 British, American, Dutch and Parsee merchants and sailors found themselves trapped inside the factories. The blockade never imposed any serious hardship on them. The facilities were well appointed. The British factory contained, in addition to its lavish banqueting hall, a chapel, a library and a billiard room. Howqua and other outside friends arranged for coolies to smuggle in ‘a constant procession of capons, boiled hams, roast mutton, and baskets of bread and eggs’.¹¹⁷ The merchants were forced to learn to do their own housework and cooking, but they still found time to play ball and leapfrog, and to organize footraces and rat hunts for amusement.

In a final twist, however, the British superintendent, Charles Elliot, who had been in Macao when the trouble began, had arrived just before the blockade was assembled. Elliot was a British official, and this would make the scene look all the more serious, in London, when it came to be reported there. He was also trapped with the others, curtailing his room for negotiation. The official trade, for which he was responsible, was shut down. Elliot decided that the situation was not tenable. On 27 March he asked the merchants to agree to deliver their opium. Each house would furnish a list, and terms would be agreed with Lin for delivery. But the novelty was this: the superintendent assumed responsibility for the merchants’ losses, in the name of the British government. The cost of all those chests floating around the estuary, unsold and effectively worthless, would be reimbursed fully, provided they were handed in to the Chinese authorities. Ruin had been staved off. ‘Our surrender is the most fortunate thing that could have happened,’ commented Matheson.118

The blockade lasted into May, but the lists were quickly drawn up, tallied and forwarded to the commissioner. From 11 April opium clippers began tacking towards the downriver island of Chuenpi. Day after day, chests of opium were landed as Lin watched over and Elliot’s deputy, Alexander Johnston, issued receipts. At last, on 21 May, the promised total was reached: 20,283 plus another eight which Innes had been found trying to smuggle at the last minute through Macao, or 20,291 chests.¹¹⁹ The official trade remained closed as the British merchants still refused to sign a pledge to abandon the opium trade compliant with Lin’s wording – the Americans and other Europeans would oblige in July – but the blockade was lifted. On 24 May Elliot led the last of the British merchants out of the factories, among them Dent, Matheson, his two nephews and William Jardine’s nephew Andrew.¹²⁰

In June Lin had the opium destroyed in a procedure that involved digging vast basins, 45 × 23 metres (50 × 25 yd) each, with timbered sides and flagstone bottoms, at a point further from Chuenpi where a small river met the estuary. It took three weeks to break the opium cakes into fragments, have them pushed into the basins and mixed in with fresh water, lime and salt and, after workers had stirred the whole mixture through with hoes and shovels, flush it all into the sea.121 Lin’s public performance is sometimes mocked for its ceremony, which included a prayer of apology to the sea spirit for this act of pollution.¹²² Actually there were good reasons for the drama, and the ceremonial destruction of the captured opium may be dated as the first of many similarly publicized operations. The TV cameras were absent, but the publicity removed all doubt that the opium had been destroyed and not kept by Lin for resale up north. Like all similar media actions, it was intentionally dissuasive. The strict security, finally, was necessary to prevent any pilfering during the long time the operation took. At more than 1,200 tons, Lin’s seizure remains the largest in the long war on drugs.

The commissioner was triumphant. The dealers, the Hong and the foreign merchants had all been cowed. To all intents and purposes, the opium trade was dead and buried. The foreigners had been forced to admit to their guilt, their opium given up and trashed. Yet unbeknown to him, thanks to Elliot’s indemnity, this had only saved them from financial ruin. The British government, moreover, had by the same token become an interested party. To be able to declare victory, Lin had had to blockade the factories. Even if the siege had been non-violent, in London it would be branded an act of war.