TEA REPAID WITH
OPIUM
Before British tea importing was a a century old,
by 1769, annual imports reached 4.5 million tons—and
paying for the tea was creating a major drain on the
crown’s currency reserves. China, with plenty of cotton
broadcloth, the main product Britain had available
The monetary drain worried even the Swedish proposed
to "shut the gate through which all the by growing
tea commercially on that continent.
By 1800, the opium trade was providing Britain with
the answer to her problem. Opium had long been taken
in China, but mainly in Sichuan where it grew. Smoking,
introduced with tobacco around 1620, made the drug
easy to use. Demand rose and Protugese merchants,
followed by British, added to the Chinese stocks.
Easy access to opium spurred by its dealers’ profit
motive caused a runaway spiral of addiction. This
poisoning of a nation was rationalized by the claim
that it helped the Indian colony generate its own
revenue. Indian-grown opium was sold to China for
silver, which remained in Canton and was credited
against debts in London. Thus, without moving any
bullion around, British merchants were able to get
silver for opium and then turn and pay for tea with
the same silver. The havoc wrought by the rapid growth
of addiction aroused the concern of the Qing dynasty
government..
Chinese forbade the importation of opium in 1800,
on the severest penalties, but the drug kept pourin
gin illegally, without the import duties the government
collected when the trade was legal. Opium was no longer
brought to the Canton anchorage, but to an island
in the middle of the bay, where it waited on ships
till collected by Chinese smugglers, who were allowed
in by corrupt Chinese officials bribed by the British.
In June 1839, the official sent to end opium importation,
Lin Zexu, burned twenty thousand chests of it on the
beach near Canton. Within a year Britain had declared
war on China, forcing the nation of legalize the opium
trade again. A decade after the end of the Second
Opium War of 1857 to 1860, the number of addicts had
grown tenfold and imports reached a hundred thousand
chests a year. The evil “foreign mud,” as it was called,
remained a legitimate item of commerce until 1908,
and addiction persisted for decades after.
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