Smoke and Gunboats: Opium, Silver, and the First Unequal Treaty

Act I: Smoke and Silver (Review Question 2)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 18, "The Opium War," pp. 316–317. Reading-guide sentence (p. 317): "Unless trade in the drug was suppressed, he argued, the Qing would have no soldiers to fight the enemy and no funds to support an army."

The Canton system and the tea problem

From 1757 the Qing confined European trade to Guangzhou (Canton). Foreign merchants lived in a strip of rented "factories" outside the city walls for the trading season. They dealt only with a guild of licensed Chinese firms, the Cohong, and paid duties through the superintendent of customs, known to foreigners as the Hoppo. The system was not a refusal to trade. It was a way of keeping a profitable trade under the control of a few accountable people, far from the capital (slide C).¹

The British problem was tea. By the late eighteenth century Britain drank millions of pounds of Chinese tea a year, and the government taxed it heavily. China wanted little that Britain made, so the East India Company paid in silver, much of it Spanish-American dollars. Opium solved the imbalance. The Company held a monopoly on opium grown in Bengal and auctioned it in Calcutta. It did not carry the drug to China itself, which would have been illegal. Licensed private "country traders" did that work, selling to Chinese smugglers off the coast and paying their silver into the Company's treasury at Guangzhou in exchange for bills on London (slide E). The Qing banned the opium trade in edicts of 1729 (against selling and opium dens) and 1796 (against imports), and repeated the bans afterward. Ebrey gives 1800 as the date of the ban (p. 316), which is one of these restatements.²

From a luxury to a mass habit

Opium had long been a medicine in China. What changed was the practice of smoking it, first mixed with tobacco and then on its own in a pipe, which made it a social pleasure for officials, merchants, soldiers and eventually laborers (slide D). Supply then exploded. After 1819 the Company faced competition from Malwa opium grown in the princely states of western India, and it answered by producing more. In 1834 Parliament ended the Company's monopoly on the China trade, and new firms such as Jardine, Matheson & Co. joined the market. The result was a price war along the Guangdong coast. Ebrey's figures make the point: imports rose "from forty-five hundred chests smuggled into China in 1810 to forty thousand chests in 1838, enough to supply 2 million addicts" (p. 317; slide F).

The silver drain, and what else drained the silver

By the 1830s silver was flowing out of China, not in. Ebrey estimates the outflow at about 2 million ounces a year in the 1820s and about 9 million in the 1830s. Because land taxes were assessed in silver but most farmers earned copper cash, the change was felt in the countryside: "A tax obligation of 1 ounce of silver took about 1,500 cash to pay in 1800, but 2,700 cash in 1830" (p. 317; slide G). Treat the second figure as an illustration. Exchange rates varied by region and year, and most series show the sharpest rise in the 1830s and 1840s.

Historians now agree that the silver crisis was real and that Qing officials blamed it on opium. They no longer agree that opium alone caused it. Lin Man-houng argues that the wars of independence in Spanish America cut world silver output in the 1810s and 1820s, and that this global shortage, together with opium, explains why China's silver stock shrank.³ Alejandra Irigoin adds a monetary twist: Chinese merchants trusted the old Spanish Carolus dollar and discounted the new republican coins, so the collapse of the Spanish coinage system disrupted the supply of the one coin China would accept at face value.⁴ The deck's slide G now says the outflow happened mainly because of opium, and its instructor note adds the world silver shortage. For lecture, it is worth saying aloud that the Qing believed opium was draining their silver, and that this belief drove policy whether or not it was the whole truth.

The court debate and Lin Zexu

In 1836 the official Xu Naiji proposed legalizing opium and taxing it, paying for it only in goods so that silver would stay home. The Daoguang emperor circulated the proposal, and it was beaten back. In 1838 Huang Juezi proposed the opposite, the death penalty for users, and the emperor asked his governors for their views (slide H). Lin Zexu, then governor-general of Hunan and Hubei, answered that the state should strike at dealers and importers. His argument is the reading-guide sentence: without suppression there would be no soldiers and no money. Lin was a jinshi of 1811 with a reputation for honesty and effective famine relief. At the end of 1838 the emperor made him imperial commissioner with full powers (slide I).

Lin arrived at Guangzhou on 10 March 1839. Ebrey summarizes his first months: he arrested some seventeen hundred Chinese dealers and seized seventy thousand pipes (p. 317). He then demanded that the foreign merchants surrender their stocks. When they stalled, he stopped all trade and confined them in the factories (slide J). Charles Elliot, the British superintendent of trade, ended the standoff by ordering British merchants to hand their opium to him, as Crown property, and then to Lin. More than 20,000 chests, about 2.6 million pounds, were surrendered. Elliot's promise that London would compensate the merchants turned a private commercial loss into a debt of the British state, and gave the opium interest its case for war.⁵

From 3 to 25 June 1839, at Humen, five hundred laborers mixed the opium with salt and lime in trenches and flushed it out to sea (slide B). Lin wrote a prayer to the spirit of the sea apologizing for the pollution. He also drafted a letter to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could sell abroad a drug it forbade at home. It was never formally delivered, though an English translation was printed in the missionary-run Chinese Repository.

Act II: Gunboats and a Treaty (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 317–318. Reading-guide sentence (p. 317): "Concluded at gunpoint, the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing provided benefits for Britain but not for China, making it 'unequal.'"

Why Britain went to war

Ebrey puts the British case in two sentences: Lin's act was "an affront to British dignity," and the British saw China as "out of step with the modern world" of free trade and treaties (p. 317; slide L). Both points matter. The merchants wanted compensation and open ports. The government of Lord Palmerston framed the war as a defense of British subjects and of diplomatic equality. Critics at home said plainly that it was a war for opium. On 8 April 1840 the young William Gladstone told the House of Commons that he did not know "a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace." A motion censuring the government failed by only nine votes.⁶

The fleet, the north, and two rejected deals

The expedition reached China in June 1840. It blockaded Guangzhou, took Dinghai on Zhoushan island, and sailed north to the mouth of the Beihe, the river that led toward Beijing (slide M). The alarmed emperor sent the Manchu grandee Qishan to negotiate and dismissed Lin. In January 1841 Qishan and Elliot reached the Convention of Chuanbi (Chuenpi): Hong Kong would be ceded, six million dollars paid, and officials would deal with each other as equals. Both governments rejected it. Daoguang had Qishan arrested; Palmerston recalled Elliot, who had already raised the flag on Hong Kong (26 January 1841), and sent Sir Henry Pottinger with orders to get more.

The Nemesis and the gap in firepower

Ebrey's most striking detail is a single day in 1841 on which one steam warship destroyed "nine war junks, five forts, two military stations, and a shore battery" (p. 318). The ship was the East India Company's iron steamer Nemesis, and the day was 7 January 1841, when the British stormed the Chuanbi forts and the Nemesis destroyed war junks in Anson's Bay (slide N). It was shallow-draft, armed with pivot guns and rockets, and could tow sailing warships up rivers against the wind and tide.⁷

Two of Ebrey's phrases need care. "The Qing had no navy" (p. 318) means no navy that could face a British fleet. The Qing did maintain provincial war-junk fleets for coastal defense and against piracy. Ebrey also says the British were armed with "rifles." Most British infantry in 1840–1842 carried smoothbore percussion or flintlock muskets. Their advantage lay in drill, volley fire, artillery and naval support, not in rifling. The deck (slide O) correctly says "musket volleys."

Up the Yangzi to Nanjing

Pottinger's campaign of 1841–1842 took Xiamen, Dinghai again, Zhenhai and Ningbo. A Qing counteroffensive at Ningbo in March 1842 failed badly. In May the British took Zhapu, a banner garrison town near Hangzhou Bay; in June they took Wusong and Shanghai; and in July they stormed Zhenjiang, where the Grand Canal crosses the Yangzi (slides P–Q). By cutting the canal, they threatened the grain supply of Beijing. At Zhapu and Zhenjiang the Manchu garrisons fought hard, and many bannermen killed their families and themselves rather than surrender. This is the moment of Ebrey's biography of Guancheng (p. 319), and it also undercuts the stereotype that the Qing simply collapsed. The dynasty's soldiers fought; their weapons, training and command could not match the British.

The treaty and the "unequal" clauses

The Treaty of Nanjing was signed aboard HMS Cornwallis on 29 August 1842 by the Qing negotiators Qiying and Yilibu and by Pottinger (slide R). It opened five ports (Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) to British residence, trade and consuls; ceded Hong Kong island "in perpetuity"; abolished the Cohong; and required an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars: six million for the confiscated opium, three million for debts owed by Chinese merchants, and twelve million for Britain's war costs. It promised a "fair and regular" tariff, but the rate was fixed only in the Supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (Humen) of 8 October 1843 at about 5 percent (slide S). Opium was not mentioned at all.

The clauses that made the settlement "unequal" came in two layers. Extraterritoriality was spelled out in the British general regulations of 1843 and the American Treaty of Wangxia (1844): foreigners accused of crimes in China would be tried by their own consuls (slide T). The most-favored-nation clause in the Bogue treaty gave Britain any privilege later granted to another power, and the Americans and French obtained the same (slide U). Ebrey groups all of this into one "set of treaties," and in doing so she also says the treaties "mandated ambassadors in Beijing" (p. 317). They did not. Resident envoys in Beijing were the central demand of the Second Opium War and were conceded only in 1858–1860. The deck avoids the error.⁸

Why call the treaty unequal (slide V)? Partly because it was imposed by force. More precisely, because the obligations ran one way. China gave up control of its tariffs and of jurisdiction over foreigners, and gained nothing in return, not even the right of its own subjects to equal treatment abroad. Chinese historians later made 1842 the starting point of a "century of humiliation." Students should know that the phrase is a twentieth-century nationalist framing, but the inequality it names was real.

After the war

The court divided between those who accepted the treaties as a way to manage the foreigners and those who wanted them reversed (slide W). James Polachek argues that the war party grew out of a literati network around the "Spring Purification" circle, which used the opium issue to attack Manchu grandees at court; the inner politics of Beijing shaped the war as much as events on the coast.⁹ Lin himself was exiled to Ili in Xinjiang in 1841, recalled in 1845, and served again as a provincial official. He died in November 1850 on his way to fight the rebels who would become the Taiping. The Daoguang emperor died that same year.

Mao Haijian's study of the war from the Qing archives reaches a severe verdict on the court: it misjudged British power at every stage, accepted false victory reports, and learned little from defeat. His book is a useful corrective to accounts that make Lin a flawless hero.¹⁰

Pierian Spring: Too Many People, Too Little Silver (Review Question 1)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 314–316. Reading-guide sentence (p. 315): "As farms grew smaller and surplus labor depressed wages, the average standard of living suffered."

The eighteenth-century Qing peace let China's population roughly double, to about 300 million by 1800, and it kept growing to about 430 million by 1850 (slides AA–BB). New World crops such as maize and sweet potatoes let farmers settle hill country, but the best land was taken. Ebrey links the squeeze to social symptoms: more conflict over water and tenancy, more female infanticide, a shortage of marriageable women, and a growing "floating population" of unmarried men who worked as boatmen, porters or charcoal burners (slide CC). Those men will reappear in Lecture 2 as recruits for sects and rebel armies.¹¹

The state did not grow with the population. The number of counties, about thirteen hundred, stayed nearly fixed, so a magistrate who once governed tens of thousands now governed hundreds of thousands, with clerks and runners who lived on fees (slide DD). The Daoguang emperor (r. 1821–1850) answered with frugality, famously wearing patched clothes and cutting court expenses (slide EE). Frugality could not pay for water control. In 1824 floods and silting closed the Grand Canal at its Yellow River crossing; in 1826 the court shipped grain to Tianjin by sea as an experiment, then went back to the canal. Jane Kate Leonard shows that Daoguang managed the crisis carefully but could not fix the underlying decay; the Yellow River's change of course in 1855 finally broke the canal system (slide FF).¹²

The banners, the hereditary Manchu, Mongol and Chinese-martial military caste, were a second fiscal burden. The court could not let them go without betraying the conquest elite, and it could not afford to keep them well (slide GG). The Opium War tested them, and at Zhapu they died fighting.

Corrections and Cautions

Details that are easy to get wrong

"Ambassadors in Beijing." Ebrey (p. 317) lists resident ambassadors among the 1842–1844 terms. They came only with the treaties of 1858–1860. Extraterritoriality and most-favored-nation treatment came in 1843–1844, not in the Nanjing text itself.
"The Qing had no navy." True only of a blue-water navy. Provincial war-junk fleets existed and fought.
"Rifles." British infantry mostly carried smoothbore muskets; the deck's slide O says "musket volleys."
Hong Kong. British merchants and ships sheltered in Hong Kong harbor after leaving Macao in 1839 (Ebrey says they "settled" there); the British occupied the island in January 1841, and it was ceded in 1842.
Dollars, not ounces. The 1842 indemnity was 21 million silver dollars, as Ebrey's main text (p. 317) and slide S say. Ebrey's reparations table (p. 325) lists it as "21 million ounces of silver"; Lecture 4's slide Q now gives dollars, with the tael equivalent, to match this deck. A Spanish dollar held about 0.72 tael of silver, so the sum was roughly 15 million taels.
The opium ban. Ebrey dates the ban to 1800; the first edicts were 1729 and 1796. Slide D now gives all three dates, with an instructor note.
The silver drain. Present opium as the Qing explanation and the main cause, and mention the global silver shortage (Lin Man-houng) when time allows; slide G's notes now do both.
Slide G (concept-silver-drain). Moved from the slide notes: the Qing blamed opium for the whole outflow, and the textbook (p. 317) follows them. Historians add a second cause. World silver output fell after the wars of independence in Spanish America, and Chinese merchants distrusted the new republican coins, so silver grew scarce everywhere (Lin Man-houng, China Upside Down, 2006; Alejandra Irigoin, 2009). The cash figures are the textbook's illustration; local exchange rates varied. The concept card says "mainly" for this reason, and the notes now tell students so without the scholarly detail.
Guancheng's career. He was not a high examination graduate: he passed the provincial examination and served as a magistrate. Slide II now says so; an earlier version said he "rose by passing the examinations."

Notes

On the Canton system as a working institution rather than a mere barrier, see Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). ↩
On the Company's opium system and the country trade, see Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), and Carl A. Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy (London: Routledge, 1999). For the eighteenth-century edicts and their uneven enforcement, see Jonathan Spence, "Opium Smoking in Ch'ing China," in Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant, eds., Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). ↩
Man-houng Lin, China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006). ↩
Alejandra Irigoin, "The End of a Silver Era: The Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Peso Standard in China and the United States, 1780s–1850s," Journal of World History 20, no. 2 (2009): 207–244. ↩
Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), remains the most detailed account of Lin's Guangzhou campaign from Chinese sources. Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (London: Picador, 2011), is vivid on Elliot's decision. ↩
Gladstone's speech of 8 April 1840 is in Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd series, vol. 53. On the Commons debate and the vote (271 to 262), see Lovell, The Opium War, and Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). ↩
On the Nemesis, see Adrian G. Marshall, Nemesis: The First Iron Warship and Her World (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), and Lovell, The Opium War. The contemporary account is W. D. Bernard and W. H. Hall, Narrative of the Voyages and Services of the Nemesis, from 1840 to 1843 (London, 1844). ↩
The treaty texts are in Treaties, Conventions, etc., between China and Foreign States, 2 vols. (Shanghai: Inspector General of Customs, 1908; 2nd ed. 1917). On the making of the 1842–1844 settlement, see John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). ↩
James M. Polachek, The Inner Opium War (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992). ↩
Mao Haijian, The Qing Empire and the Opium War: The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty, trans. Joseph Lawson, Craig Smith and Peter Lavelle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), first published in Chinese as Tianchao de bengkui (1995). ↩
Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Susan Mann Jones and Philip A. Kuhn, "Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 107–162. ↩
Jane Kate Leonard, Controlling from Afar: The Daoguang Emperor's Management of the Grand Canal Crisis, 1824–1826 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996). ↩
Pamela Kyle Crossley, Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). See also Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). ↩