Next time you hear some politician blaming China for all the problems in the world, remember our friends in the East India Company. Unregulated, government and military backed capitalist that they were, started a WAR in order to extract a trade balance with China.

Even though Europeans were eager to acquire Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, the Chinese remained indifferent to European goods for much of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. The emperor Qing restricted foreign merchants access to ports and confined them to the Guangzhou region of China.  Foreign merchants were also limited in that they could only trade from October to March as during the summer months the people were needed to manage agriculture. Traders were also forced to work only through licensed Chinese intermediaries. 

In 1793, the British sent Lord George Macartney, to Qianlong’s court to negotiate greater access to the empire’s markets.  Macartney wanted a reduction in tariffs, the ability of merchants to live in China year-round, and the stationing of an ambassador in Beijing.  While the emperor agreed to receive the English­man, Macartney bristled at the protocol of an imperial audience demanded.  Even though he refused to kowtow (kneel and touch the ground with the forehead in submission), Qianlong received him courteously but refused all Macart­ney’s requests saying that China (the Qing) had everything it needed in abundance: ‘I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.‘  After Macartney left Qianlong instructed his ministers to bolster China’s coastal defenses.  In 1815, the British sent another envoy, Lord Amherst, but the emperor (now Jiāqìng) simply expelled him after another tussle over the kowtow. 

The British East India Company did, however, have something that at least some Chinese wanted… opium.  Opium is a narcotic drug that is obtained from the unripe seedpods of the opium poppy which was primarily grown in British-controlled India.  While opium was already cultivated in China, it was produced only in small quantities.  In China this powerful and addictive drug was regulated and used only for soldiers and manual laborers relied on it for pain relief.  Early in the 18th century the Portuguese found that they could import opium from India and sell it in China at a considerable profit. By 1773 the British had discovered this trade and British East India Company established a monopoly on opium cultivation in the Indian province of Bengal, where they developed a method of growing opium poppies cheaply and abundantly effectively cutting off the Portuguese supply. 

Britain had a huge trade imbalance with China. There was tremendous demand in Europe for Chinese tea, silks, and porcelain pottery, but there was correspondingly little demand in China for Europe’s manufactured goods and other trade items. Consequently, Europeans had to pay for Chinese products with gold or silver. The opium trade created a means of balancing that trade.  Chinese addicts demanded more and more opium imported from India and were willing to pay for this opium in gold.

The East India Company could not trade opium directly.  There was a Chinese ban.  They resorted to “country traders” who were private traders, licensed by the company to take goods from India to China. The country traders sold the opium to smugglers along the Chinese coast. The gold and silver the traders received from those sales were then turned over to the East India Company.  In China the company used the gold and silver it received to purchase goods that could be sold profitably in England.

This illegal trade drained the imperial coffers of silver. In March 1839, the emperor sent the official to Guangzhou to enforce a crack down on the illegal trade by the East India Company.  By July, thousands of addicts were arrested and twenty-three thousand kilos of opium confiscated.  China then demanded that the 350 or so foreign traders in Guangzhou surrender ALL their opium. As tensions rose, Chinese soldiers locked the merchants in their warehouses then blew horns and banged gongs to increase the pressure on them. It took six weeks, but the foreigners handed over 1.4 million kilos of opium.  This was then destroyed by mixing it with water, salt, and lime and flushing it out to sea.  This was a HUGE loss for the East India Company.

In response, EIC warships (flying the British flag) blockaded the entrance to Guangzhou’s harbor, smashed through Chinese defenses, and captured ports including Shanghai and Ningbo, blocking mari­time traffic on the Grand Canal and lower Yangtze. This became known as the First Opium War.

Eventually the Chinese were forced to capitulate and signed the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, which granted the British access to Guangzhou, Shanghai, and three other ‘treaty ports.’ China also ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British in perpetuity for 99 years.

Crime does not pay, unless you are the East India Company …

Opium smoking and addiction remained a problem in China well into the 1940’s.  Although opium trade routes extending from the southeastern and southwestern regions of Asia closed temporarily during World War II, cultivation of the plant continued and even prospered in areas of China. Opium smoking was finally eradicated by the Chinese communists after they came to power in 1949.

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