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embargo would hurt the Chinese more than it would hurt their own empire.
    Lin was in no mood to cave in to an embargo, and neither was the Court in Beijing. The commissioner tried to appeal to reason by sending a letter to Queen Victoria. “Suppose the subject of another country were to come to England to trade,” Lin wrote. “He would certainly be required to comply with the laws of England, then how much more does this apply to us of the celestial empire! Now it is a fixed statute of this empire, that any native Chinese who sells opium is punishable with death. . . . Pause and reflect for a moment: if you foreigners did not bring the opium hither, where should our Chinese people get it to resell?” 9 The British responded by changing the subject. For them, the conflict could not be presented as centering on the undignified subject of drug smuggling. It was, as the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston put it, about the country’s honor, trade access, and, ultimately, which empire’s rules should reign supreme.
    The Sino-British war, often called the Opium War, broke out in March 1839, not because of Chinese attacks on foreign shipping, but because the Qing authorities attempted to protect vessels from abroadthat were willing to break the British embargo. When Commissioner Lin evicted merchants who obeyed the embargo from Guangzhou, they found refuge in the Portuguese-held port of Macao at the mouth of the Pearl river. But the authorities there dared not shelter them for long, and most of the merchants and their families ended up on the nearby island of Xianggang, which the foreigners called Hong Kong. The merchants were furious about what seemed to be a financially disastrous strategy by the British government and demanded that strict measures be taken against those who continued to trade with the Chinese. In November 1839 British warships attempted to stop one of their own barks called The Royal Saxon (no less), which was carrying rice from Java to Guangzhou on the first leg of its return journey after taking convicts to Australia. The Chinese navy moved in to protect the ship and the British opened fire, sinking four Chinese vessels. It was the grim beginning of a conflict that was to change China’s foreign affairs forever.
    Neither China nor Britain wanted full-scale war. But London was convinced it needed to protect British principles and interests, and Beijing was certain that Britain had to be contained. The British government, under attack from the opposition in the House of Commons, needed to come up with a response that supported free trade and protected commerce without being seen as a direct supporter of the opium business. Palmerston made military enforcement of the embargo the centerpiece of his policy. He and his colleagues were convinced that Britain was now a global power strong enough to impose progress on backward peoples. With naval bases in Aden, Singapore, India, and Sri Lanka, the British could send their warships into East Asia and have them supplied and re-equipped on the way. While uncertain about the prospects of engaging the imperial armies on land, Palmerston had no doubt about the superiority of the British fleet, even when fighting far away and without support on shore.
    The negotiations that went on intermittently in early 1840 proved to be a dialogue of the deaf. When they failed, the British in the summerlaid siege to Guangzhou and occupied key cities in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, heading north. Within twelve months, the foreign ships controlled the mouth of the Yangzi river and the southern entrance to the Grand Canal, as well as several small towns in the delta, among them what was to become Shanghai. Fighting in central China grew fiercer as Emperor Daoguang, fearing for the safety of his capital, threw in the Qing’s best Manchu troops. But they could not prevent the British from using their fleet to take control of the economic lifelines at the core of the