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China The Opium War, 1839-42
During the eighteenth century, the market in Europe and America
for tea, a new drink in the West, expanded greatly. Additionally,
there was a continuing demand for Chinese silk and porcelain. But
China, still in its preindustrial stage, wanted little that the
West had to offer, causing the Westerners, mostly British, to incur
an unfavorable balance of trade. To remedy the situation, the
foreigners developed a third-party trade, exchanging their
merchandise in India and Southeast Asia for raw materials and
semiprocessed goods, which found a ready market in Guangzhou. By
the early nineteenth century, raw cotton and opium from India had
become the staple British imports into China, in spite of the fact
that opium was prohibited entry by imperial decree. The opium
traffic was made possible through the connivance of profit-seeking
merchants and a corrupt bureaucracy.
In 1839 the Qing government, after a decade of unsuccessful
anti-opium campaigns, adopted drastic prohibitory laws against the
opium trade. The emperor dispatched a commissioner, Lin Zexu (1785-
1850), to Guangzhou to suppress illicit opium traffic. Lin seized
illegal stocks of opium owned by Chinese dealers and then detained
the entire foreign community and confiscated and destroyed some
20,000 chests of illicit British opium. The British retaliated with
a punitive expedition, thus initiating the first Anglo-Chinese war,
better known as the Opium War (1839-42). Unprepared for war and
grossly underestimating the capabilities of the enemy, the Chinese
were disastrously defeated, and their image of their own imperial
power was tarnished beyond repair. The Treaty of Nanjing (1842),
signed on board a British warship by two Manchu imperial
commissioners and the British plenipotentiary, was the first of a
series of agreements with the Western trading nations later called
by the Chinese the "unequal treaties." Under the Treaty of Nanjing,
China ceded the island of Hong Kong (Xianggang in pinyin) to the
British; abolished the licensed monopoly system of trade; opened 5
ports to British residence and foreign trade; limited the tariff on
trade to 5 percent ad valorem; granted British nationals
extraterritoriality (exemption from Chinese laws); and paid a large
indemnity. In addition, Britain was to have most-favored-nation
treatment, that is, it would receive whatever trading concessions
the Chinese granted other powers then or later. The Treaty of
Nanjing set the scope and character of an unequal relationship for
the ensuing century of what the Chinese would call "national
humiliations." The treaty was followed by other incursions, wars,
and treaties that granted new concessions and added new privileges
for the foreigners.
Data as of July 1987
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