Hong Kong Vice
The First Opium War (1839-1842) was the beginning of the end for Asia’s most powerful state – the Qing Dynasty. How did China’s bitter defeat lead to the rise of a magnificent coastal city?
Was Britain the world’s biggest drug smuggler? We explore the origins of the First Opium War and its devastating impact on China
even at its height in the 18th century, China’s government could not resist the sheer force of free trade. To be specific, free trade as practised by enterprises such as the British East India Company and various Western merchants who roved the world dealing in commodities. Chinese attitudes to foreign intrusion, which shaped their own laws, managed to restrict business activities with expatriates to the Canton enclave where licensed traders could operate from walled compounds. Since Canton was located at the mouth of the Pearl River, foreign-owned vessels bearing goods could anchor offshore and declare their cargo. No outsiders were allowed to set foot anywhere beyond Canton unless they were official diplomatic missions.
By 1830, just a decade and a half since the Battle of Waterloo, a tantalising commerce in byproducts from the flowering plant papaver somniferum flourished between the foothills of the Himalayas and China’s southern coasts. A new lifestyle had swept China’s guarded port cities by then. Men of all classes enjoyed their narcotic vice in parlours and backrooms to smoke gummy balls extracted from the poppy bulb, which produced a soothing effect and had some medicinal properties.
Packaged in wooden chests and delivered by steamers across the Bay of Bengal, through the Singapore Strait, and unloaded at Canton, a multitude of dens and venues purchased the opium and fed it to their clients. The Qing outlawed opium use in 1820, to little avail, as its customs officials and mandarins were susceptible to corruption. Profits from opium sales kept rising as volumes imported doubled each year.
By 1838 the imperial court in Peking was so outraged by the narcotics epidemic it decided to take action. Another impetus was the effect on the government’s finances. Indian opium was being purchased in bulk with silver, the preferred medium of exchange between China and Great Britain. As the amount of silver being paid to British merchants grew, a worrisome trade deficit strained the government’s balance sheet. China, long an economic powerhouse, was losing its revenues to an illicit import compared to when it enjoyed surpluses from exporting ceramics and silk in bygone generations.
Commissioner Lin Zexu was appointed to rectify Canton’s out of control port situation.
A canny bureaucrat with a talent for spectacle, Lin had chests of confiscated opium spoilt and then thrown from the Canton warf. Bringing troops with him, he so intimidated the British Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot, that the Canton expatriates gave up more than 20,000 chests of opium. The demonstration sent shock waves. Having gotten used to pliable Chinese officials and almost no meddling in their affairs, these same merchants soon wrote home and demanded an official response.
But Lin refused to be swayed by the outrage of foreign ‘barbarians’ and the sting of lost revenues left the British merchant community aghast and vengeful.
road to war
It was the aristocratic Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston who concocted an adventure for the British Navy on the premise of upholding free trade. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, Palmerston’s rhetoric and writing on the matter seems laced with irony. China had been willing to trade with Europe but only as an exporter. Its culture and society had little use for foreign-made goods. But what Palmerston truly advocated was free trade that enhanced the British Empire’s access to the Chinese market, whose size was measured by the awesome population size of nearly half a billion subjects ruled by the Qing Dynasty.
The onset of war exposed the Qing Dynasty’s creeping weaknesses. On paper, Peking had the resources to field a million reservists at once. After all, the Qing Dynasty was built on a martial foundation by the Manchus, fierce horsemen whose conquering spirit expanded their empire into Central Asia, with the whole Tibetan plateau reduced to a protectorate. In fact, the extent of the Qing Dynasty in 1839 was greater than China’s present borders.
By the 19th century, however, administrative problems and an insular worldview reduced the mighty Qing armed forces to a paper tiger. A class of patriotic generals and officers commanded a rabble who had neither enough weapons nor uniforms. Firearms had arrived in Asia by the
16th century and saw widespread use. For a brief period, Japan mass-produced copies of Portuguese muskets that became known as Tanegashimas after the place where they were discovered. In China, government-owned foundries and mills manufactured cannons and rifles in serious quantities, albeit obsolete since the Qing rejected foreign technology.
Facing the token presence of the Royal Navy in late 1839 were feeble coastal defences, small armies waiting in their forts, and cannon-armed riverine junks. The first major naval engagement, on 29 October 1839, set the pace of the war. With Canton blockaded by just two British warships, a frigate and a sloop with 18 cannons, a fleet of 29 war junks sailed down the Pearl River to meet them. The Chinese didn’t hesitate to engage the British vessels, only to be crippled en masse. Later on, the disparity in firepower made Chinese commanders commit suicide rather than accept defeat and relay such to their superiors. In November the same British ships guarding Canton devastated another Chinese assault by war junks.
Once Canton was in British hands and the safety of the foreign merchants guaranteed, a long impasse followed between the warring nations. While the press at home railed against the bizarre circumstances that led to the conflict, there was no great mobilisation undertaken as the British Empire faced off against the world’s most populous country. Neither were industries tasked with churning out ships and material to furnish whole divisions. Indeed, on the British side the total manpower that fought the First Opium War numbered less than 20,000.
Iron ships versus wooden junks
For the Qing government, it was also the very first occasion when its sovereignty was violated by a foreign invader arriving by sea. This was
“The disparity in firepower made chinese commanders commit suicide”
significant. In historical terms, China was never under threat from naval fleets. Yet in 1840 it bore the full brunt of a hostile British expedition combining Royal Navy and East India Company steamers. Commanding the fleet was Rear
Admiral George Elliot who had at his disposal three battleships, eight frigates, eight sloops and 36 transports. The fleet carried a ground force of 3,600 British soldiers and Indian sepoys mustered in Singapore. Here was a strange yet menacing hybrid of a European military operating alongside the paramilitaries maintained by the East India Company, a rare example of public-private cooperation in 19th century world politics.
Since the war never involved immense set piece battles or savage massacres, the rest of it can be summed up as exercises in blackmail. With the metropolis of Guangzhou located north of Canton being threatened by Admiral Elliot’s expedition, an agreement was reached in Chuenpi where the island of Hong Kong was ceded to the British. This was negotiated by the same Superintendent Elliot who earlier allowed Commissioner Lin to seize chests of opium. But his personal views upheld the vested interests of the merchants in Canton. However, upon Lord Palmerston’s urging, greater demands needed to be made on the Chinese and this prolonged the war for another year and a half.
The Qing court never settled matters with diplomacy, because the actions of certain British officials and the Royal Navy were deemed piratical and undeserving of recognition.
From late 1841 onwards, the British held on to Canton and launched attacks on Shanghai. A great distance separates the two cities and the fact that the Royal Navy’s ships were unmolested in their transit shows the Qing’s weakness.
A last feeble attempt at resistance was met outside Nanking in the summer of 1842. Like before, stout citadels sought to halt the invading warships’ progress and serve a decisive blow. Of course, this did not happen. British gunnery and Chinese incompetence were insurmountable; never wanting for arms and men, the Qing still failed to protect their homeland. Fearing the prospect of foreign troops marching toward the capital, Emperor Daoguang allowed his ministers to negotiate peace in Nanking. Representing the British was the explorer and ex-east India Company man Henry Pottinger whom Lord Palmerston trusted to execute England’s will. Since Pottinger was in a position to impose terms, the Nanking conference proved a brief one and was concluded aboard the HMS Cornwallis. As Palmerston intended the year before, Chinese indemnities were broadened to opening cantonments in the port cities of Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai. It helped that the Canton business community, including those responsible for opium trafficking, were familiar with these locations. Yet the final blow took the greatest toll on the Qing Dynasty. A grand sum of 22 million silver dollars was to be paid Great Britain, with the first tranche worth six million paid before the year was out. Failure to deliver the sums meant the resulting debt produced interest. The Qing paid in full to the detriment of the state’s foreign exchange, thereby accelerating economic decline.
But the true prize of the First Opium War was Hong Kong. Within a handful of years, wellappointed British residences were erected on its waterfront facing Kowloon, which was added along with the ‘New Territories’ in 1898 when a 99-year lease for the entire area was wrangled from the ailing Qing Dynasty.
With Hong Kong open for business, junks began crowding its harbour as far as the eye could see. Demand for warehouses and other vital infrastructure attracted thousands of
Chinese labourers, who were all too happy leaving impoverished villages and farm work for
dependable living wages. A sorry aspect of Hong Kong’s expatriate society was to assign spacious residences for Europeans while the Chinese — including the island’s original inhabitants — had no choice but to fend for themselves in slums.
Island treasure
The decades of rapid urbanisation took its toll on public health, when bubonic plague struck Hong Kong in 1894 a more concerted effort at addressing social ills and better living conditions was undertaken. Despite it, the city kept growing and by 1900 it was estimated the population reached 300,000 people. But an unsavoury aspect of Hong Kong’s origin story is the unrestricted opium trade. It’s beyond doubt the Treaty of Nanking was a boon for opium smugglers, who now had multiple ports to receive their merchandise. Despite having a police force among its first vital institutions and British laws upheld throughout the island, Hong Kong’s underworld was born the moment the island passed to foreign rule. The personal governance of Pottinger, who negotiated with
Qing officials at Nanking, did little to save Hong Kong from becoming a prime destination in the maritime opium route to China. Even when illicit poppy cultivation flourished in certain provinces of the Republic of China (1911-1946), narcotics kept arriving in Hong Kong until the mid-20th century.
The legacy of the First Opium War is a terrible one. The Qing Dynasty’s decline had begun in earnest and its effect on generations of Chinese cannot be understated. Once Asia’s greatest empire unsullied by colonialism, China was now ripe for exploitation. If the First Opium War was so onerous, the humiliations of the Second Opium War left deep scars in a nation reeling from the Taiping civil war that lasted from 1850 until 1865. While the fanatical Taipings carved a path of destruction in central and southern China, a joint Anglo-french army marched on Peking and burned down the Imperial Palace. Of course, the expectations were the same; China must capitulate to Europe’s strongest countries, or else. To put China’s decline in perspective, we should recall it fought a losing war against Japan in 1895, where it lost the Korean Peninsula and Formosa (now called Taiwan), and the Qing Dynasty collapsed by 1911 after the revolt led by Sun Yat-sen. The civil war that followed reduced the fledgling Chinese republic to a patchwork of territories and the country’s troubles worsened as Japan tried annexing ever greater swathes of its territory.
This long decline or ‘century of humiliation’ so haunts China’s current leadership that it now promotes a brand of nationalism where China’s needs are inviolate, its territory sacrosanct, and its ascension to becoming a world power unstoppable. The ideas that formed this worldview stem from the bitter lessons of the First Opium War, a petty exercise in imperialism that ruined a whole Asian civilisation.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the cultural and legal antipathy for the drugs trade endures until the present. There is no graver bookend to the heritage of laissez faire drug trafficking unleashed by British merchants than the modern Hong Kong police’s own listed penalties for plying the trade. The harshest among them reads:
‘Any person who cultivates any plant of the genus cannabis or the opium poppy, shall be liable upon conviction to a fine of HK$100,000 and imprisonment for 15 years.’
“This ‘century of humiliation’ haunts china’s current leadership”