Restless Empire Read Online Free PDF

immemorial, and from the early Ming period opium, mainly arriving from Southeast Asia as trade or tribute, had become the drug of choice for much of the elite as a calmative or a painkiller. As use of the drug grew in the early nineteenth century—probably resulting from a combination of availability, fashion, and affluence—the authorities became increasingly concerned with its effects. Officials charged that drug users became lazy and effeminate and claimed that the spread of opium was a threat to the well-being of the state. The Jiaqing emperor complained in 1813 that “before only city rascals had opium and smoked it in private. But today, attendants, guards and officials, they all take it. This is truly sickening.” 7
    By the latter half of the 1810s, Beijing began looking for more effective methods for upholding the emperor’s 1796 total ban on opium import. 8 But the imperial administration’s new concerns about the effectsof opium came just as smuggling of the drug was becoming central to the British East India Company’s China strategy. After almost two generations of a negative trade balance with China, the company had finally chanced upon a product that was not only popular there but also widely available from British India. For Britain, the China trade had suddenly turned both profitable and important in size. India had been a colonial enterprise whose cost-effectiveness many in Britain doubted, but now it began generating income through a government monopoly on opium production. Meanwhile, private investors profited from selling the drug in China, especially after the EIC’s monopoly on trade was abolished in 1833. In the 1820s, the import of opium more than tripled. Beijing noted that large amounts of silver were flowing out of China as payment for opium and feared that inflation and state impoverishment would result.
    Daoguang, who had taken over in 1820 after his father had been electrically discharged, believed strongly in opium prohibition, possibly because he had experimented with it and other drugs during his younger years. By his second decade in power, his war on drugs was becoming central to the emperor’s rather indeterminate policies against decay, corruption, and disloyalty. While a few of his advisers proposed legalization—declare victory in the struggle against drugs and then tax importers, producers, and consumers—the emperor and the majority at Court would have nothing of it. They were afraid that opium import was part of a foreign plan to weaken China and dominate it. Like Christianity, drugs helped move people’s attention from where it properly belonged: on service to the Qing state and loyalty to the emperor and his representatives.
    After years of hesitation on the opium question, Daoguang decided to strike at the point of entry. In 1838 he sent an imperial commissioner to Guangzhou with vague orders to eliminate opium smuggling. But in the man they chose the Court may have got more than they bargained for: Lin Zexu, the former governor-general of Hunan and Hubei andone of China’s top officials, had worried deeply about the impact of opium in the territories he had administered. When he arrived at Guangzhou in March 1839, Lin immediately began rolling up the domestic part of the operation by arresting 1,700 known Chinese opium smugglers. He then attempted to get the foreigners, mostly British and Americans, to trade their vast stores of drugs for tea at a fixed price. When they refused, Lin moved his troops into the Western enclave, confiscated all the opium he could find, and destroyed it outside the city walls. More than 1,200 tons were mixed with lime and salt and thrown into the Pearl river. Lin also demanded that foreigners who had injured or killed Chinese police during the upheaval be handed over and that all foreigners sign a promise never to smuggle opium again. The British authorities refused and ordered all foreign merchants to leave Guangzhou. They hoped that an