Nature's Evil

Though the British controlled the trade by importing opium on their ships, they relied on Chinese middlemen, who rapidly made their fortunes. Silver flowed out of China, and a currency crisis began, which increased the role of opium as a means of payment. For the Confucian state, based on rationalism and a kind of meritocracy, opium was evil incarnate. Patriots saw it as a hostile invasion, a retribution of the highest order: people perished, the state was undermined, traditional institutions disappeared. Drug addiction was associated with literacy. In 1839 the Chinese emperor ordered the destruction of opium in the ports and warehouses; on that occasion more than 1,000 tonnes were found and burnt. Outraged by this interference in free trade, the British Empire declared war. Using their first military steamships, British troops forced China to pay compensation. The British obtained Hong Kong and five more ports for duty-free trade. The price of opium fell sharply, and people lower down the social scale began using it, just as had happened with sugar in Europe. Only then did the production of Chinese opium increase. It was considered poor quality and its price was half that of Indian opium, but it saturated the market. As it got cheaper, opium was available to ever increasing numbers of ever poorer people. In reply, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) started in the coastal areas of China: the rebels were Christian reformers battling the forces of evil. The leader of this peasant war, Hong Xiuquan, called himself Christ’s younger brother – he was an unsuccessful civil servant who had failed his examinations four times. Practising asceticism, the Taiping movement forbade opium, alcohol and prostitution. But it had few weapons and no revenue, and the rebellion was put down in bloody battles. The Western powers supplied the Chinese army with artillery and military officers. Together with a parallel uprising of the Muslim Dungans in north-west China, the Taiping Rebellion constituted a civil war, engulfing most of the state. Many millions died from hunger or in battle. Millions more emigrated and settled in South-East Asia. 15

Back in England, the opium war was the subject of parliamentary debate. The prime minister, Henry Palmerston, supported intervention. Richard Cobden, the leader of the Manchester liberals, and William Gladstone, the future prime minister, spoke against it. Gladstone’s sister Helen was an opium addict. 16 Her way of life threatened Gladstone’s political career; he spent many years trying to get her addiction cured and understood the nature of the disease better than others. Responding to the war in China, the British authorities in India increased the production of tea, seeing it as an alternative to opium. From 1854 they gave away large plots of land (up to 3,000 hectares) to any European farmer who wanted to grow tea for export. When the railways reached the foothills of the Himalayas, Indian tea exports to Europe approached those of China. Eventually it should have restored the balance of trade, but in 1856 the Second Opium War began. French and English troops joined forces to occupy Chinese ports and warehouses, liberating them for the opium trade. Undermined by opium and the Taiping, the Chinese lost one battle after another. After seizing Peking, the Western powers signed a peace treaty with China through the mediation of the Russian ambassador, Count Nikolay Ignatieff. China made opium use legal and ceded new ports for free trade. A declaration on the freedom of worship did not prevent a crackdown on the Taiping.

The irony was that Chinese entrepreneurs were now ousting India from the opium market. The British could not resist this development. Opium was grown mainly in the interior provinces of China, but the British controlled only the coastal territories. Opium opened up the interior provinces for domestic trade: more opium was shipped throughout China than salt or rice, which were consumed locally. Prices fell, demand grew, and internal production grew too. Opium and tea supplanted cereals; later, this became one of the causes of mass famine. By the end of the nineteenth century China was already producing nine times more opium than India. But, unlike India, China grew poppy entirely for domestic consumption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, opium became China’s internal affair: the country consumed 95 per cent of the global production of opium, and it was nearly all home-grown. This was the Chinese version of the Great Transformation: the peasants worked in the fields, growing opium for wages paid in opium, which was consumed on the spot. Sugar opened markets for global trade; opium closed them.