Dan Snow's History Hit - The British Empire, China and Opium

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

1/2. Victorian readers were captivated by descriptions of smoke-filled opium dens among backstreet brothels and pubs in London's East End in Oscar Wilde novels. Opium use in Britain in the 19th century was widespread and while opium dens were scarce, Victorians could buy opium over the counter in chemists as treatments for headaches, coughs and even as a sleep aid for babies. Opium was important to the British Empire's health but more so to its imperial aims to control Asia from the Indian subcontinent to the eastern markets in China.In the first episode of a two-part mini-series Dan and Dr Jeremiah Jenne, a professor of Late Imperial and Modern China, delve into the history of the Opium trade in the British Empire, how it brought crisis to China and started a war that still impacts China's relationship with the west today.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion. Dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new. So wrote Oscar Wilde in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Literary depictions like this of sordid East London with its opium dens clouded with smoke, men lying in a stupor in brothels and backstreet pubs, captured the imaginations of the Victorians. The reality, in fact, was that in 19th century Britain there were very few opium dens like the ones described by Oscar Wilde. Although opium use was widespread, it was popular. But you didn't have to go to some dingy den to do so. It was possible to walk into a chemist and buy, without prescription, laudanum, cocaine, and even

arsenic. Opium preparations were sold freely in towns, in country markets, and they were consumed by members of the literary elites, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Keats and Charles Dickens, as well as working people. Generally speaking, those people were self-medicating. It was used as a painkiller, it was used as a relaxant, but it was also used by people attempting to numb the boredom, the drudgery of endless days of hard work. Most shockingly, I think perhaps to us, is that it was also given to babies to help them sleep, which unsurprisingly, it was quite effective at. So opium was a part of Victorian society. It was an important part, but not just on an individual level to treat people's ailments, but on a much bigger strategic level as well, because it helped to prop up the

economy and fund Britain's industrial development. It also enabled Britain's wider imperial ambitions, because controlling the production of opium in India, exporting that opium to China, created a dependency within China that funded British trade and strengthened Britain's imperial position in Asia, both South Asia and East. Now this might have had economic, political and military benefits to Britain and its empire, but this opium trade devastated Chinese society and it triggered two wars that proved disastrous for the Chinese empire. Hastening its fall in a period now infamous in China, taught in every school, remembered as the century of humiliation.

The story of opium and the opium wars are essential to understanding modern China. The Chinese Communist Party has turned the opium wars, the century of humiliation, into a kind of foundation myth, a legitimizing story that underpins its power in modern China. And you'll hear why in this podcast. Over the next two episodes, I'll be unraveling what actually took place in the 19th century and why that story has been mobilized as part of China's national narrative today.

I'm going to be joined by a man who knows this story inside out, Dr. Jeremiah Jenny. He's an expert in this. He's taught late imperial and modern Chinese history for 17 years. He's been living in Beijing for more than two decades. This is a story as important as it is fascinating. Before we get started, let's talk about opium itself. What is it? It's derived from the sap of the opium poppy. That is a flower native to the eastern Mediterranean region. poppy. That is a flower native to the eastern Mediterranean region. So opium was cultivated and used by ancient civilizations five and a half thousand years ago. It's present in the fertile valley the Sumerians referred to as the joy plant due to its psychoactive effects. Like so many other domesticated crops the cultivation of opium spread from Mesopotamia to ancient Egypt to Greece and even Rome. It was traded extensively

on the Silk Roads, which connected the populations of the Mediterranean world with East Asia, Eastern Central Asia. So soon it was being used from the Eastern Mediterranean right the way across to China. We know in Egypt it was being used as an analgesic. It relieved pain and discomfort. We have papyri talking about it from three and a half thousand years ago. Hippocrates, the ancient Greek father of medicine, acknowledged its usefulness. He said it was calming, it was soporific. It was used in Western medicine from certainly the medieval period onwards. Through the 17th century, British interest in opium intensified as colonial trade

routes established by merchants and freebooters and explorers sort of rediscovered its properties through interactions with the Islamic and South Asian worlds. And as those English, those British merchants and adventurers traveled ever further east, they started establishing relations with China. From about 1635, British merchants were asking permission to trade in places like Guangzhou and Xiamen, and they discovered quite quickly they had a problem. They wanted Chinese goods, things like porcelain, silk, and of course, tea. But they discovered they didn't have much to exchange for it. Let's hear from Jeremiah. Jeremiah, thanks for coming back on the pod, buddy.

Oh, of course. My pleasure. After a pretty rough 17th century, China is back at the beginning of the 18th. What state is it in? You think of the 18th century as an era in the last dynasty or the last era of imperial rule in China, the Qing dynasty. It's often considered the 18th century, the high point of this dynasty. And there are some reasons for this, not the least of which between the 1660s and the 1790s, you only have three emperors. And that's an impressive period of continuity that

leads to economic development, cultural flourishing, and a surging population. But are there clouds on the horizon here? I mean, I guess in terms of Europeans are pushing ahead in terms of their industries, in terms of their maritime capabilities. Is there a point in that period when you're like, hang on a minute, China is beginning to fall behind relatively, or is that a 19th century story? Well, I think there are some aspects of what we see in the 19th century happening in the 18th

century. There's a saying in China, it's part of the I Ching, when the sun reaches its apex at midday, it begins to set. And even in a time of really unrivaled power in East Asia, you can look at things like internal rebellions, corruption, the problems of administering a great and growing empire on the cheap that we're already setting in. And what is their view of these pale-skinned Europeans who are beginning to come over the horizon and start trading in East Asia? Well, you know, it's in dribs and drabs at first. the merchants and the administrators of this great of China, of the Qing Empire, they don't really see much of a distinction between these traders or these newcomers from much further west and some of the people who've been traveling to China or they've been trading with closer to home. This idea that China was this closed society until one day, you know, the British, and with a certain amount of help from the Americans, kicked the door in,

and then suddenly China was open to the world, is a little bit of a myth. The empire was always open for trade, but trade in their terms. And when the first Europeans arrive, generally speaking, they're content to play by the rules. Certain ports, certain times, certain restrictions. But if you want the goods, if you want the tea, if you want the goods, if you want the tea, if you want the silk, if you want the porcelain, that's what you got to do. So those are the famous Chinese exports. What do Europeans or Central Asians have that Chinese people want? You know, it's tough because one of the more famous incidents is when Lord McCartney goes to China and he greets the Qianlong Emperor who basically dismisses And he greets the Qianlong emperor, who basically dismisses McCartney's request for trade with this idea like, we set no stock by your goods.

It's important to remember, though, that at the time, this emperor is ruling over what is essentially a continent-sized trading network unto itself. Sure, there are some goods that are produced outside of this network that are needed or used or desired, but there's not that many of them. And certainly not enough of them to balance the amazing outpouring of exports for which there really are no sources, other sources of things like tea, porcelain, and silk. Well, so let's take the Brits. They are hungry.

There's a huge market in Europe, and it's a hugely valuable trade. So they've got this problem. They're running out of things to pay for these purchases with. They are. And attempts to find some goods that could fill that gap run into problems. For example, the- Tweed. Exactly.

And if you think about where in South China, it's on the same latitude as Havana. Like, here, please have our woolens. Like, yeah. Have you seen what the temperature is out? There have been attempts to find some other goods, things like sandalwood, ginseng from Americas, or furs, seal pelts, sea lion pelts. These were actually products that the Chinese wanted. The problem with a lot of these products is that they were also sourced in some pretty out of the way places. The problem with a lot of these products is that they were also sourced in some pretty out of the way places. And ecologically, they were disastrous commodities that were soon harvested to the extent that

they could no longer sustain a trade. So ultimately, if they don't want the woolens, if they can't have any other products, what do you got to pay? You're paying cash. And of course, China has been often remarked the graveyard of silver, at least into the late 18th century. And that means it sucks in the silver like a black hole and none of it's circular. So there's a lack of specie elsewhere.

There's some statistics that suggest, and again, we're dealing with economics in the 18th century, it's more of a guesswork, but something like half the silver that was extracted from you think about the horrible mines in places like South America and Central America. But half of that silver apparently went across the Pacific to China to pay for goods that were then going to Europe, who were sending the soldiers to other parts of the world to force people to mine the silver. And yeah, there you go. And all that silver going over there, there's challenges with that, right? From the perspective of China, it's a bimetallic currency system. You pay for things in copper.

Silver is also used to pay taxes. If you're flooding a particular market with a silver currency, that's going to cause dislocations for sure. And in the rest of the world, particularly as you get the 18th century becomes the 19th century, new ideas about balance of trade being linked to national strength, the need for silver or the need for currency to help strengthen economies back home. And of course, revolutions in Latin America and leading to a decrease in the production of silver around the world. All of these things suddenly make silver very dear. It really makes it imperative that some of these trading corporations and trading nations

try to find something else to replace all the silver that they're using to pay for the exports. RAOUL PAL, So I think people can see where we're going here, but let's introduce opium now at this point. Opium had been getting into China overland, right, since well before this period. MARK BLYTH, You've got to love a party where it only takes 10 minutes to get to the drugs. Opium had been in China going back to 1,000 years. It was a commodity that was traded along the trade networks of Asia. It was generally something that was consumed, usually mixed with water or tea or

some other. It was a medicine. And the uses of opium in China and later on in the West, we look at them now and we're like, wow, okay. For example, it was good for headaches, which I get. Baby's cough. Yeah, that was my favorite one, the mother's soothing syrup. That's the thing that was used for. The difference though, and this is something we see in other contexts too, what happens when a very powerful medicine starts to get taken recreationally or starts to get abused to the extent that it becomes recreational? And this easily happens with opiates, as any number of more contemporary examples can suggest. One of the other things that makes opium a much

more potent, if we will, commodity, a new way of taking it emerges. And of course, that's linked to things like the Colombian exchange, new products going back and forth between the hemispheres. We talk about the chili peppers and we talk about the potatoes, but tobacco. And you think about what it would have been like for tobacco to hit the coast of Asia. I've lived in Beijing for over 20 years. I'll tell you that there are definitely times when I feel like there are parts of China that is still the world smoking section. People like to smoke stuff. And around the world, people start smoking tobacco. And it didn't take long for people on the coast of Asia to do what 14-year-old boys have been doing since the beginning of time. What else can I put in this

thing and light on fire and inhale? And so they started mixing tobacco with all kinds of stuff. And one of them was mixing it with opium. And of course, once they did that, it was like, ding, ding, ding, we have a winner here. And so eventually a new way of taking opium, you ditch the tobacco. It's a little pellet. It's easy to ship. It's easy to store. It's easy to sell. And it produces a very powerful and addictive high. And if you think about what happened when in a different time in a different place, cocaine became crack. That's kind of what's going on here. And it just so happens that the entities and the countries that had the biggest problem

with the trade imbalance in silver were also those entities and countries that had access to large supplies of the poppy, which could be used to process and make opium. Right. Particularly, we're talking, I guess, about the Brits in South Asia, with their Indian empire, which is growing enormously in the 18th century. Is that where opium is coming from? Right. So, I mean, the opium poppy, the poppy that produces the resin that then can be then processed into opium, a lot of that was coming from South Asia. There were various places in South Asia where it was grown. There were various routes to get out of South Asia.

Not all of them were the sea routes that linked South Asia and East Asia. It is tempting in these discussions to bash the Brits a little bit. And I'm sure we'll get to that in a moment. But it is worth noting that the Americans, once they sorted out their little revolutionary constitutional problem, were right there too. Although being locked out very often of the South Asian trade would get their opium, which had been brought overland into ports in like Turkey. And so there were other methods of getting it there. But yes, when we're talking about the bulk of the trade, maybe up towards about 80% of it, we're talking about opium that was produced in India, a lot of it, although not

all of it under the auspices of the East India Company, who industrialized the process in kind of a proto-industrial, it's more of a proto-industrial way, but created a process by which it could be harvested, processed, stored, and then sold and shipped. Not through their own ships, of course, right? The East India Company didn't want to get their hands dirty with the ships, right? They were happy to sell it, but then it got to China in a different way. Yeah, middlemen, like local traders, effectively. Yeah. The country trade. The country trade. The country trade. Yeah.

But they still had a monopoly on the production. So is this the invisible hand of the market? Just the Chinese are, it becomes a fashion, it becomes a craze in China, and sources just sort of emerge and entrepreneurs take advantage of that? Or is there like a strategic top down, like someone at the East India Company is saying, we are going to push opium into China and get them all addicted. Is there a sort of evil genius behind it all? I mean, if we were to ask a high school student who's studying for their exams in China, they would tell you, as they've been taught in the textbooks, and these textbooks have become increasingly patriotic over the last 10 years, thanks to the leadership of General Secretary

Xi Jinping. But the idea is that, yes, Britain, as a way of balancing their trade, crafted a scheme by which they got a large group of people in China addicted to opium. And then as a result, they supplied that need and that allowed them to balance their trade. And of course, when China righteously tried to cut this off, that led to war. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated. And I'm not in any way letting the East India Company off the hook. They're producing drugs that are being pushed in China. But there was a lot of marketplace demand there.

And there's a corollary in the modern sense. This is an argument that's being had as we tape this in 2024. Fentanyl, or the products that make fentanyl in the United States. The United States government wants China to crack down on the production of these drugs. And China says, well, we will, but shouldn't you do something about the people who are buying it? And it is a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of situation. But it is worth noting

that the company wouldn't have been so profitable if they weren't able to sell a product that there was demand for. The nefarious part, or the insidious part, right, is that, of course, these kind of products, these kind of commodities, and this is true whether we're, I mean, to some extent, not the same extent, if we're talking about other commodities like coffee, sugar, tea, but especially when we're talking about opiates, it creates its own demand. And as opium becomes cheaper, as it becomes more widespread, like a lot of these other, let's just say, a lot of these other kind of mind-altering commodities, it starts as a fad at the top and starts to trickle down

until it becomes a situation where a lot of people are taking it. Was everyone in China at the time of the early 19th century hooked on opium? No. In fact, it's possible that it was actually not that widespread. But there was a lot of opium going in. It was all being sold. Clearly, it was a market. When we often think about the opium-soaked coastlines of China with every official and every soldier and the opium dens everywhere like that, that's from two sources. One, it's from a slightly later time in Chinese history in the late 19th and early 20th century when the trade had been legalized to a certain extent and had become so widespread that it was endemic. The other one, of course, is just Orientalist fiction and movies that likes to portray other people as being somehow morally lax. And so the idea of that lifestyle caught on

in fiction. So you mentioned the Pearl River Delta or these ports. Pearl River Delta now on the site, this kind of unbelievable mega city, this conurbation, including Hong Kong and other places. So that's the primary artery through which this trade is entering China. And then these East India Company ships slash local traders, they're arriving with hulls full of opium, they're leaving with hulls full of Chinese exports. Yeah, and that's the trade. The reason they're going to South China, well, one, South China has often been the port that handles most of the trade with the Indian Ocean area. But also- So the pre-existing trading patterns.

Pre-existing trading patterns had been there for centuries. The other part of it is that the empire had rules about trade, and they often conducted trade in a kind of trade fair. And this wasn't just the Europeans in Canton or Guangzhou. This was true if you were in the caravan routes and other ports of entry around the empire. You would show up for a certain amount of time with your ship. You would sell what's on the ship. You would collect the stuff that you're going to buy.

And you would leave. You wouldn't be establishing residence. You wouldn't be bringing your women and your families. There were very specific rules while you were there. But you were there temporarily and on sufferance. And so to that extent, so the Chinese are managing this external trade. What changes?

Do the volumes of opium just become impossible to ignore for the Chinese government? You know, I think there's a lot of things that happened in the early 19th century that kind of overwhelm the ability of China to kind of process what's happening. The first one, and I think the most important one, is the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution changes the technological playing field between parts of Western Europe and the rest of the world. When McCartney goes to see Qianlong in 1793, and Qianlong says, thanks, but no thanks. You know, there are some people who would

later say, well, if only he knew, you know, about the might of the British Empire, he wouldn't have been so cavalier. Maybe, and certainly in some areas, particularly in things like naval warfare, the British had an advantage. But I bet if you looked across the board, the most prosperous parts of Europe at around the turn of the 19th century, for the pre-industrial era, and the most prosperous parts of China were probably at roughly the same level of institutional economic industrial development. In fact, probably both Western Europe and the most prosperous parts of China were hitting kind of a cul-de-sac where they'd achieved the most you could possibly achieve in a pre-industrial economy. And that's the key.

You can't blame the Qianlong Emperor for not being able to see into the future. But of course, the Industrial Revolution changes things. The Industrial Revolution plus the Napoleonic Wars, which of course produces a real hothouse environment for the development of military technology and strategy. Most of the soldiers who fight in some of these early colonial wars are veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. And as a result, when we get to the time in the 1830s, 1840s, well, it's a different relationship militarily. The other thing too, and this is a lot more to what's happening in England, are changes

in how trade is even understood. In the 18th century, it's about how can we get these fabulous products back to our markets. In the early 19th century, and especially when you get into the 1830s, 1840s, now it becomes manufacturing. How do we open these areas to become markets for our own goods? That's a very different kind of incentive. And so when you have that kind of transition, well, now you're placing different demands on China. Now you're kind of going to China. It's not kind of transition, well, now you're placing different demands on China. Now you're kind of going to China. It's not just about like, listen, we want tea.

Can we get the tea and do it in a different way? This is to maybe phrase this in a way that would be more familiar to us in the present day. China, how do you get to stop manipulating your currency? You got to open your markets, free trade, fair trade, rules of international trade. There's a reason why. And I'm not justifying this. Don't get me wrong. But there's a reason why Xi Jinping gets a little bit reluctant to listen to some of

the demands from the Americans, particularly because he's like, currency manipulation, free trade, open the markets. Where have we heard this before? Oh, that's right. It's right before you people started selling us drugs. We got something like as many as 10, 12 million people in China now in the early 19th century addicted to opium. Well, let's take a break there because we're going to find out exactly how the Chinese respond after To be continued... We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, Jeremiah, we're back. You've given us a whole range of reasons why the Chinese state is not happy about this. How and why does it decide to act? Well, by the 1830s, there's clearly some issues that the court is concerned about the trade in South China. Now, keep in mind, what's going on in South China at this time in the early 19th century? The trade in opium isn't necessarily at the forefront of the emperor's to-do list. He's dealing with a lot of internal rebellions, a lot of them by sectarians and other groups. Most of them are in the areas from South China. From his perspective, he's starting to see this whole area being kind of a problem

zone. So the fact that there is smuggling going on in Guangzhou in this drug is not the problem. It is a problem in the context of a much larger problem. It's symptomatic that the South is in danger of perhaps slipping out of his grip in some way. If you're an emperor based in the North, one of your challenges is what's going on far away from your capital. And as you get further away, the control gets a little bit sloppy. What does affect the emperor, though, is when the economics get weird. Opium is illegal, and there are sporadic attempts to enforce the ban.

But one of the problems with dealing in a legal commodity is, and you kind of alluded to this, Dan, you're having these ships park off the coast and the opium is then smuggled into the trade network. The problem with that is drug smugglers generally don't like to exchange giant bales of tea and silk for their product. They want cash because they're smugglers. And so what ends up happening is the amount of opium going into China is rising steadily. And it gets even more so after the Charter Act, the East India Company loses their monopoly.

And it's kind of thrown open to all comers. And now everybody's bringing opium. Free trade. Free trade. And all that silver that had been pouring into China for decades now starts going the other way in a much shorter amount of time. Now, there are people out there listening to us right now who understand economics better than I do.

If I knew anything about economics, I probably wouldn't have become a history teacher. But I do know enough that if you flood a particular market with a single currency, and then you pull the currency out in a short amount of time, you're going to cause problems. It's what some people have called a silver tsunami, a tidal wave. You get those tsunamis, right? When the water goes in, it's devastating, but it's when the waters recede that it's catastrophic. And what you have is a similar situation going on in South China. Exchange rates are out of whack. Inflation is out of whack. The emperor is legitimately concerned about this. And what do you do if you're an emperor? You're surrounded with the best and

brightest. You get them together and say, all right, what do we do about the drugs problem? And some of the ideas he gets, some of the suggestions he gets are surprisingly modern. There are many officials who say, I've got it. Dude, legalize it. Legalize and tax it. Legalize and tax it. If you try to suppress it, you're going to create an underground economy. The corruption is going to get even worse. Let's just get out ahead of this. Some officials even went a step further and went like, well, we already have like a monopoly board that controls salt and other key commodities. Let's set up an opium control board, open a monopoly. Somebody's going to make money off this. Why not us? And they were also well aware,

and some of the British traders were too, that increasingly the opium being sold in China was not coming in on the ships from South Asia, but it was being grown by Chinese farmers who were getting in on the action as well. So now you think, well, okay, let's legalize the system. I mean, we talk about this in the 21st century all the time. At the same time, though, and this is one of the things I think that in Britain, they misunderstood about China and what we still sometimes in the West misunderstand about China today. Obviously, it's not a monolith, but neither is the government. Just like in any government, it may not be as obvious to outsiders, but there's all these different ideas flying around, debates and factions. Same thing was happening here. There were free traders among the officials. There were

progressive ideas among the officials, but there were also officials who were like, you want us to get into the business of selling drugs. You've got to be out of your mind. And those voices, conservative, moral, stalwart voices carried the day, at least in these debates. Right. It's easy to see why. I mean, it's conservative, stalwart, moral, a little bit nationalist as well, because a lot of this stuff is coming from outside. So you can see it's a pretty potent combination. Yeah, I think definitely the idea that if we're going to have laws, we should enforce them.

And if we're going to enforce them, we should do it for the good of the people. That's what we do as officials. And one of the most important or louder voices in this debate who carried the day was an official named Lin Zexu, known mostly in history as Commissioner Lin. And Lin was the great incorruptible official who had stamped out the opium trade wherever he had served. He is, and I imagine I am radically dating myself with this reference, but he was the untouchable Elliot Ness. He was the one cop who could not be made dirty. And the emperor sends him down to Guangzhou with the mandate to get control of the situation. At first, he really does, right? He does his job. Oh, yeah. He comes in there. He does what he did in other places. He arrests smugglers. He executes dealers. He uses whatever moral authority and legal authority he had to try to get the foreign merchants to stop dealing in opium.

There's also a guild of Chinese merchants who are in charge of the trade. In fact, they're the conduits between the foreign merchants and the rest of China. He uses considerable pressure on them to try to stamp out the trade. There are stories. Now, I have to kind of figure out the source for this, but I've heard this a few times. And if someone out there can point me to the source, I'd love it.

That he was actually relatively kinder to users. There's a story, at least when he was in one of his earlier postings, and he may have done this in Guangzhou as well, that for people who were arrested for kind of what we think of as like possession, that he told his officers to like, okay, take away their drugs, break their pipes, and you make sure to tell them, don't you ever do that again. But in order to make sure that these

now officially ex-addicts reform, and knowing that it could be kind of difficult and needing some support, he would put them together in groups of 10 to support themselves in their recovery, which I think is an incredibly empathetic and modern way to deal with this problem. There was apparently one caveat, though. If any one of the 10 relapsed, they were executed along with the other nine. So you could kind of think of this as like a 12-step program with a really effective 13-step. Oh, yeah. I mean, you're not going to let your friends go back.

Yeah. That's for sure. Friends don't let friends get beheaded. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So he is using a range of putative but also kind of modern ideas to try and stamp out the trade. Were they aware this was going to lead to conflict with the European powers?

Yeah, that was kind of the question at court, because Lin gets hung up the drive after all of this. And the idea was, we told you to take care of the situation. We didn't tell you to start a war. And it's possible, again, that the Chinese, just like the British, didn't totally understand that there were divisions within China itself, at least the government, that maybe could have been exploited. I don't know if the Qing government had a totally clear idea of what was changing in the trade. They certainly didn't have a totally clear understanding of what was going on back in parliament. But once the East India Company loses its monopoly, now you no longer have a company man as sort of the nominal head of the merchant community. They send a representative of the British government. And there'd already been some trouble with this. Some of the early representatives they sent

were not very effective in their role. They got a little over their skis and caused a lot of problems. But up until the 1830s, up until Lin's arrival, some of their subsequent British representatives there were generally pretty okay with working with whoever was their opposite, who they thought was their opposite in the Chinese government, or if the Chinese government thought these guys were just sort of barbarian chiefs. Now, once Lin kind of goes in and from the perspective of the traders, completely overturns the whole system from the Chinese side and enforces the laws, the response is now we have a representative of the crown to kind of speak for us.

And when you have a representative of the crown speaking for you and a representative of the crown who's now part of the negotiations, it takes on a national character, which makes it a much more likely possibility that could lead to national conflict right because now suddenly you're disrespecting the flag you're disrespecting her majesty's representative or at least her majesty's opium yeah and that then becomes a problem because lynn wants the the traders to hand over their opium he uses a variety of coercive measures, holding them hostage, essentially locking them in their warehouses and not letting them get their servants and food and stuff. And how dire the situation was depends a little bit on how historical the memoir was.

But ultimately, the British commissioner there, the person who's in charge, a guy named Charles Elliot, comes up with the idea. And he kind of panics a little bit. He's like, all right, we got to get out of this. So hand me over all your opium. It's a little question how much he pushes the second part. But the takeaway from the part of many of the traders was, it will make restitution on whatever you turn over. For the opium traders, this actually turns out to be a really good deal because they had a glut of opium because they weren't able to move it because Lynn had cut off all their networks. And they're like, you really? Because we were looking at this stuff rotting in our warehouses. You're going to take it at full value? I'm like,

here you go. In fact, they ended up turning, I mean, Lynn thought he was going to get like, you know, maybe, I don't know, a thousand chests of opium and a hundred pounds of opium a chest. No, they turn over like 20,000 chests of opium. It's like this ridiculous, staggering sum. Commissioner Lin doesn't really know what to do with it. It's like originally he may have even intended to give them some money in exchange for it, but he's not going to buy this much. And it takes his soldiers days to get rid of it all. They burn it in giant pits, surrounded by guards and no one can come in. They're like, I'm just hanging out here breathing deeply. And they put it in giant pits. They mix it with lime

and seawater, and they wash it out into the bay. And Lynn's there too, performing a little ceremony of appeasing the gods of the sea for poisoning them and all that stuff. And it all goes away. But then what happens is this. Before Elliot's letter can get back to, I mean, it takes weeks, right? Months even. Before Elliot can notify London that, oh yeah, by the way, I may have possibly suggested that you're going to be paying for this. For whatever reason, the merchants are able to get their letters there even quicker. So people start showing up and like, for the British government, like, hi, so when are we getting our money for the opium? And the British government is like, when are you getting your what for the what now? And that's when they start asking questions about what the

hell Elliot's been doing out in China. And this touches all the key 19th century British origin stones, right? Because this is apparently, you're interfering with free trade, you are confiscating property, which is the absolute sine qua non, you don't mess with property, right? And then you're disrespecting the Union flag and Her Majesty's representative. RAOUL PAL. And you're threatening people. LYN ALDEN. And you're threatening people. So this causes belly for the Brits. RAOUL PAL. Oh, yeah. I mean, it turns out too that while these letters are going back and forth, the British merchants flee Guangzhou. They feel like they're being pressured there.

And then they take refuge in the Portuguese colony of Macau. But then Lin goes down to Macau and tells the Portuguese, you want to keep your colony, kick the Brits out. Now the various, you know, a couple thousand or so members of the British trading community, wives and children are basically in a flotilla cut off from the land trying to find food and clean water. And they're being blockaded from landing in different places. When Elliot tries to force the issue, the result is that they're fired upon by the forts. And one reason they're in this flotilla

is that there was a case where some British sailors had killed somebody in a brawl. These sailors have been tried by Elliot, but not by the Chinese court. And so as a result, the Chinese were like, well, if you're not going to hand them over, we're not going to hand over food. So the situation had gotten quite dire. There'd been shots fired already. There's a whole podcast I'm sure to be done on the politics in parliament about the opium war. But the takeaway from this is that Palmerston, one way he's able to get this through is that even people who think like, are we sure we really want to turn our young Queen Victoria into the world's largest narco baron? We're like, well, yeah, that opium sucks, but you can't fire on British nationals.

And once the war started, we got to at least punish them. And this is also, I think, a part where it gets a little mission creep. The original plan is to send ships there and bombard a little bit. It's almost like the way the Americans conduct things, a bombing campaign. A little gunboat diplomacy. A little gunboat diplomacy. Not a real war, but these things have a habit of becoming real wars. And so, yeah, all those other things I mentioned, I didn't realize you now also have the British women, the specter of British women and children being disrespected and harmed, and especially at the hand of Asians.

And that is this growing popular press in the UK, a literal audience. I mean, that stuff's catnip for this, well, we call it later in the century jingoism, but this sort of growing popular patriotism, you might say. One of the big questions about this, though, is like, what was the war about? And scholars debate this. I've talked about this a lot. And I get questions from the audience. And people ask, people ask, well, it wasn't really about opium. It would have happened anyway, because two civilizations. And China just didn't understand the way the world worked and it

needed to be open and it was closed and all of these things. So eventually, it would have been the tea war or it would have been the cotton war, Maybe. But often I hear arguments like that. I'm transported back to my own country, the United States, and some of the unreconstructed conservatives who argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but was about states' rights. Sure. Were there ongoing issues that were undergirding the conflict? Absolutely. Were there tensions there that led to war? Sure. But what was the war about? Yeah, it was about free trade. But the freedom to trade what now? Just like states' rights. Yes, it's all about the rights of the state to decide on certain issues. What issue is important

to you again? And so, yes, I think that the Chinese are quite right when they say, this is a war about opium. Acknowledging there were a lot of other factors around it too. But at the end of the day, one group wanted to continue the trade in an illegal substance. The other group wanted to enforce a ban on that substance. And that led to a conflict that led to war. That's what this was about. People should remember that Gladstone, the great liberal prime minister of Britain, he agreed with you wholeheartedly. I mean, this was something that at the time, but also subsequently, the Brits would be pretty embarrassed about. Yeah. And when I talk about this in China, I've given lectures about this in China. This doesn't take anything away from what a truly terrible moment this was for China. But I think a lot of people in China are surprised when they realized that there was so much opposition outside of China, in

Britain, over not just the opium trade, but over the actual war itself. And the idea that there were people speaking passionately in Parliament, in the papers, saying that this is completely wrong and we should not do this. I think that tends to go against the kind of way it's talked about in the textbooks, where it was just, you know, an evil Western plot to hold down China. You know, and some of the first shots fired were fired by Chinese Navy ships protecting foreign traders from a British blockade. At one point, very early on in the conflict, Elliott says, well, you want us to sign a bond saying that we won't deal opium. Well, we won't sign that bond because the terms are unacceptable. But there were some ships that were run by Quakers, for example.

We don't deal with opium. We just want to keep trading. So they went down the river and traded. And when they did that, Elliott ordered a blockade of these ships, tried to outrun them. And when the Navy ships fired warning shots to keep the British ships from trading with Guangzhou, the Chinese ships went to their rescue and a battle was on. It's amazing just how kind of messy it gets. It's not so simple as just one side against the other. There was merchant interest. There was commercial interest. And as with so much imperial history, these are not big decisions made in Whitehall. These are, or even in Beijing, these are messy situations that deteriorate the crumbling frontier of empire, right? And the minute you get press reports back...

You think about like the 18th century, early 19th century, and warfare and diplomacy. The sheer logistics of getting instructions. In parliament, there are people who are decrying the fact that Eliot has kind of created these conditions. This poor guy, according to him, he has essentially a panic attack, a whole nervous breakdown as a result of this because he's under so much pressure to make decisions with no instructions whatsoever. It takes six months.

We send an email. He's waiting six months just to get any idea of what he should do. So he's trying to decide things on the fly. He's waiting six months just to get any idea of what he should do. So he's trying to decide things on the fly. And sometimes not all of us have been born, bred, or have the temperament to make great decisions under considerable pressure. Eliot had many qualities. He was in charge, for example, of trying to end slavery in the West Indies before he was

in charge of supervising a bunch of opium smugglers. You got to kind of feel that somewhere in the personnel office, they had his number. But the result was that sometimes decisions he made weren't always the best ones. So the first shot's been fired in strange circumstances. So what happens next? The British blockade the Pearl River? What ends up happening is there are some skirmishes in and around the Pearl River Delta while everyone waits for a more substantive fleet to arrive. And once that happens, you have ships of the line, you have steam ships,

including quite famously a ship called the Nemesis, which was one of the first kind of iron hold ship. It had a shallow draft, which meant it could go up currents, against currents, up rivers and things like that, which made it devastating on its own. But even more so because of its steam power, it could pull and tow ships of the line into position, parking them into places where they might not ordinarily be able to get to. And those guns were devastating against the Chinese forts. And the result was, you know, let's cut off trade. So blockading, attacking the forts, destroying the defenses in places like this in South China, then moving up the coast. And once you start moving up the coast, you start to make the emperor and his court very nervous. And there's a lot of debate about

what to do, but essentially they say, okay, we never meant for this to get this far. And maybe we can work with these, you know, this rebellion, just like we've worked with all the other rebellions we've had in this area. And so they decide to negotiate pretty quickly. They decide to negotiate a treaty that will help to end the hostilities. The problem is that the people negotiating the treaty don't quite understand their instructions. And one of them, of course, is Charles Elliott. He stayed there. He's a survivor. Well, not for long. But he negotiates a treaty in which he, in his eyes, he didn't see this as a

war to get a lot of things. He saw it as, let's reopen trade, let's guarantee the safety of the trading community, and let's get back to business. So he negotiates a settlement that he thinks will pay for the opium that was destroyed. He negotiates the cession of an island, which is what the British wanted, in this case, an island called Hong Kong. Heard of it. I think somebody, maybe it was even Palmerston, who kind of said it was a barren rock with an area fishing village on it or something like that. It'll never be a mart for our trade. Right. He wrote it off, yeah.

Clearly, he didn't see what the real estate prices in Central would be in the 1990s. Ultimately, when the British government hears what he has negotiated, they're like, that's it? We just sent a whole flotilla. You thought this was this major conflagration. This is the only thing you get? Hong Kong, some indemnity. And of course, from the perspective of the court in China, their negotiators are like, dude, you gave away Hong Kong. What are you thinking? So both Elliott and his opposite number were replaced. And in the replacement, because of course this takes time,

hostilities recommenced. And it would take another year or so for an official treaty to be signed. RAOUL PAL, But the outline of that treaty ends up being? MICHAEL GREENSTONE, What ends up happening is, instead of just focusing on the Pearl River Delta, in the second round of hostilities, the flotilla goes north, and they start attacking. RAOUL PAL, Right, to Shanghai. MICHAEL GREENSTONE, Right.

We're around where today's Shanghai is. The idea is, at any time, China crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. One of the ways that you, for any listeners out there who are planning someday to invade dynastic China, you'll want to take the Yangtze River, because once you take the Yangtze River, which is the big, long river right in the middle, you cut China in half. The Yangtze River also supplies the Grand Canal that runs from south to north and connects the Yangtze River area with its prosperity and its agriculture with the capital in the north. So you control the Yangtze River area with its prosperity and its agriculture with the capital in the north. So you control the Yangtze River, you cut China in half, you cut off trade in the Grand Canal, you've essentially economically crippled China. And the key to doing that,

to take the Yangtze River, is you've got to take some of the strongholds that control the river. One of the most important ones is a city called Nanjing or Nanking. If people are wondering why that city seems to get routinely sacked, and it does almost every other century for quite a long time, including most famously and most traumatically in 1937, it's because it is a major target of operations if you're conducting war in China. The British, in this case, take the Yangtze River. They move their ships up towards Nanjing. And it is there, under the point of guns, the negotiators from the Chinese side are forced to sign a treaty, which

all the things that Eliot got, his replacement, Henry Pottinger, got even more so. Kong Kong, but then 21 million. One of the great things about 19th century wars, you can send a bill to the people you fought for all the bullets you fired at them. Things like opening new ports of trade, including Shanghai, which had been a city, but not necessarily a major city to trade. And other kind of interesting items like to trade. And other kind of interesting items like extraterritoriality, the idea that from this point on, if you commit a crime in China and you're not Chinese, you should be tried by a court of your own people, or generally said, a court of white people. And of course, think about what that means if you're in China from this point on. Yes, you lost Hong Kong, and that's bad. And there's now

foreigners living in Shanghai. But think about what something like extraterritoriality means. Sure, the British don't colonize your country, but a couple of British soldiers or a couple of American sailors or a couple of French guys get drunk one night and they kill your brother. So you go to your local police, your local magistrate and say, I need justice for my brother. And the magistrate looks at you and goes, I don't know what to tell you. And so think about what that does for how you feel about these outsiders. But also think about what that makes you feel about your own government. What do you mean you can't help me? What are you, completely impotent in the face of these outsiders? Well, yes, they are. Because if they try to arrest these British sailors or these

American soldiers, they'll find themselves on the wrong end of a gunboat. But over time, you start to see kind of a rot set in. I'm not saying there's a direct link, but it's part of a mosaic in an era in which the faith in this dynasty starts to crumble. People will be very familiar with lots of episodes of British military history on this podcast. And I think one of the most unremembered, but one of the most fascinating, is the idea that Britain is able to push these naval forces, these amphibious forces, right up the Yangtze River, almost as far as Nanjing. I mean, this is reaching deep into the heart of the Chinese empire. On British ships, it's an extraordinary story there. And as you say, putting your heel on the windpipe of the Chinese empire while you're doing it, astonishing. And what a turnaround when generations before the Brits have been arriving in China as supplicants. I guess let's finish with the opium where we

started. This also means opium is going to continue flowing into China. Well, one of the instructions that Elliot's replacement got was, oh, and by the way, in your negotiations, try not to bring up opium. It's a touchy subject with them. And so opium is not actually mentioned at all in the Treaty of Nanjing, except for the part where they say sort of compensation for goods destroyed, and they have to itemize that. Opium is not legalized. And when other treaties are signed, because of course, once the British signed their treaty, the Americans are right behind them like, hi there. We don't want to get shut out of this trade. So do we get a treaty? And they're like,

we thought you were the same people. No, no, we fought a war. Okay, you get a treaty. And then the French show up and like, bonjour, mes amis. Like, do we get a treaty? Like, yes, you get a treaty. And the kingdom of Sweden and Norway show up and they get a treaty? I don't know. And then Belgium shows up and they're like, what's a Belgium? So they didn't get a treaty. The French are like, don't worry about them. But the point was they were handing out treaties like Oprah Winfrey hands out cars on her TV show. Like you get a treaty and you get a treaty and you get a treaty. And so as a result of all of these treaties, the various foreign powers are like, wait, we could have gotten so much more. And then they went back and were like, no, store's closed. But the American treaty and the French treaty had a condition in them. It said,

in 12 years, we can reopen negotiations. And because of a clause that was put in all these treaties, a most favorite nation clause, what one power got, they all got. So then Britain said, okay, well, we can renegotiate our treaties in 12 years as well. Well, that just set the clock ticking. Which we'll be hearing all about on the next episode. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Dan. you you