Opium Trade (#140, Topic B)

After the Chinese emperor commanded Imperial Commisioner Lin Zexu to put the illicit British opium trade to an end, in 1839, Lin was able to gather, from a Chinese oficial account included as a clipping in my brother-in-law's album (#139), 20,283 cases of opium stored in warehouses in Guangzhou. (Another account gave the total as 2,613,879 pounds. Assuming both figures are reliable, a case of opium contains some 128 pounds.) Lin held a public-burning as a means of warning British and her US allies of China's determination to eradicate this scheme. Undeterred, under the cover of darkness, foreign vessels at the harbor continued to smuggle opium during the night. Lin was able to approach these vessels and their loads, destroying 23 in total -- the harbinger of the Opium War. Jacques Gernet, in his A History of Chinese Civilization (1972 in French and 1982 in English)shows that (pp 534-5) Britain, through the East India Company, began to smuggle opium into China as early as 1729, with 200 cases. It doubled to 400+ cases in 1790, grew by tenfold to 4,228 cases each year (on average) between 1817-19, to about 5,000 cases in 1820, 5,959 in 1821, 9,035 in 1823, and 12,851 (annual average) between 1826-28. In 1838, the year before Lin's public burninag of opium, "at least" 40,000 cases were smuggled in. After China lost the Opium War in 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing called for (1) paying Britain an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars,(2) ceding Hong Kong to Britain, (3) opening 5 coastal ports for trading, and (4) acknowledging opium as a legitimate item for importation. By 1850, the annual import of opium -- now legal -- jumped by more than 50% to 68,000 cases, and jumped by almost another 50%, to 96,000 cases, in 1873. According to another account (R J.C. Burton in Prologue, Fall 1999 (a National Archives & Records Administration publication)), Warren Delano's (FDR's maternal grandfather, #139) opium trade in China was about 10% of Britain's; his source was Turkey -- a lucrative transatlantic cooperation-cum-competition. Dave and Stefan, a pair of fellow bloggers residing in Hong Kong, in a 7/5/05 entry entitled "The US Opium Trade, Hong Kong and Taiwan," mentioned that, following Britain's lead in having Hong Kong, USA had considered "acquiring" Taiwan -- back in 1850s, by Peter Parker, a member of US's consular corp in China.