Editing First Opium War (section)

=== Crackdown on opium ===
{{Main|Destruction of opium at Humen}}
[[File:Commissioner Lin Zexu.jpg|thumb|upright|Commissioner Lin Zexu, dubbed "Lin of Clear Skies" for his moral integrity.]]
[[File:Letter by Lin Zexu to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.jpg|thumb|right|upright|[[Lin Zexu]]'s [[Official Communications of the Chinese Empire#Memorials|"memorial"]] ({{lang-zh|c=摺奏|labels=no}}) written directly to [[Victoria of the United Kingdom|Queen Victoria]]]]

By 1838, the British were selling roughly {{cvt|1400|long ton|kg}} of opium per year to China. Legalization of the opium trade was the subject of ongoing debate within the Chinese administration, but a proposal to legalise the narcotic was repeatedly rejected, and in 1838 the government began to actively sentence Chinese drug traffickers to death.<ref>Hanes p. 44.</ref>{{Clarify|date=September 2021|reason=There are more than one Hanes in sources}}

There were also long-term factors that pushed the Chinese government into action. Historian [[Jonathan D. Spence]] lists these factors that led to war:
:the social dislocations that began to appear in the Qing world, the spread of addiction, the growth of a hard-line mentality toward foreigners, foreign refusal to accept Chinese legal norms, changes in international trade structures, and the ending of Western intellectuals' admiration for China.... When the tough prohibitions of 1838 began to take effect, the market diminished and dealers found themselves dangerously oversupplied. A second contributing factor was that the new British post of superintendent of foreign trade in China was held by a deputy of the British crown....If the Chinese crossed the superintendent, they would be insulting the British nation rather than the business corporation....[The superintendent could] call directly on the aid of British armed Forces and the Royal Navy in times of serious trouble.<ref>[[Jonathan D. Spence]], ''[[The Search for Modern China]]'' (1990), p. 153.</ref>

In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor appointed scholar-official [[Lin Zexu]] to the post of Special [[Imperial Commissioner (China)|Imperial Commissioner]] with the task of eradicating the opium trade.<ref>{{Cite web |title=England and China: The Opium Wars, 1839–60 |url=http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/opiumwars/opiumwars1.html |access-date=3 June 2016 |website=victorianweb.org}}</ref> Lin's famous open "[[Lin Zexu#Campaign to suppress opium|Letter To Queen Victoria]]" appealed to [[Victoria of the United Kingdom|Queen Victoria]]'s moral reasoning. Citing what he mistakenly understood to be a strict prohibition on opium within Great Britain, Lin questioned how Britain could declare itself moral while its merchants profited from the legal sale in China of a drug that was banned in Britain.<ref name="Fay p143"/> He wrote: "Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified, and you may plead ignorance of the severity of our laws, but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut this harmful drug forever."<ref>[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1839lin2.html Commissioner Lin: Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839]. Modern History Sourcebook.</ref> The letter never reached the Queen, with one source suggesting that it was lost in transit.{{sfn|Hanes|Sanello|2004|p=41}} Lin pledged that nothing would divert him from his mission, "If the traffic in opium were not stopped a few decades from now we shall not only be without soldiers to resist the enemy, but also in want of silver to provide an army."<ref name="Sharpe">{{Cite book |last=Kort |first=Michael |first2=June M. |last2=Grasso |first3=Jay |last3=Corrin |title=Modernization and revolution in China: from the opium wars to the Olympics |year=2009 |publisher=Sharpe |isbn=978-0-7656-2391-1 |edition=4th |location=Armonk, NY}}</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2021}} Lin banned the sale of opium and demanded that all supplies of the drug be surrendered to the Chinese authorities. He also closed the [[Pearl River (China)|Pearl River Channel]], trapping British traders in Guangzhou.<ref name="China: The First Opium War" /> As well as seizing opium stockpiles in warehouses and the thirteen factories, Chinese troops boarded British ships in the Pearl River and [[South China Sea]] before destroying the opium on board.<ref>{{Cite news |date=6 August 2016 |title=Why the Chinese military is still haunted by this 19th-century 'humiliation' |url=https://theweek.com/articles/640709/why-chinese-military-still-haunted-by-19thcentury-humiliation |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200423172227/https://theweek.com/articles/640709/why-chinese-military-still-haunted-by-19thcentury-humiliation |archive-date=23 April 2020 |access-date=7 July 2017}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jjdDAAAAcAAJ&q=chinese+seize+opium&pg=PA72 |title=Report from the select committee on the trade with China: together with the minutes of evidence ... Ordered ... to be printed 5 June 1840 |date=1840}}</ref>{{better source needed|date=September 2021}}

The British Superintendent of Trade in China, [[Charles Elliot]], protested the decision to forcibly seize the opium stockpiles. He ordered all ships carrying opium to flee and prepare for battle. Lin responded by besieging the foreign dealers in the foreign quarter of Guangzhou, and kept them from communicating with their ships in port.<ref name="Sharpe" />{{page needed|date=September 2021}} To defuse the situation, Elliot convinced the British traders to cooperate with Chinese authorities and hand over their opium stockpiles with the promise of eventual compensation for their losses by the British government.<ref name="China: The First Opium War" /> While this amounted to a tacit acknowledgment that the British government did not disapprove of the trade, it also placed a huge liability on the exchequer. This promise, and the inability of the British government to pay it without causing a political storm, was used as an important ''[[casus belli]]'' for the subsequent British attack.<ref>"Foreign Mud: The opium imbroglio at Canton in the 1830s and the Anglo-Chinese War," by Maurice Collis, W.W. Norton, New York, 1946</ref>{{page needed|date=September 2021}} During April and May 1839, British and American dealers surrendered 20,283 chests and 200 sacks of opium. The stockpile was publicly destroyed on the beach outside Guangzhou.<ref name="Sharpe" />{{page needed|date=September 2021}}

[[File:Destruction of opium in 1839.jpg|left|thumb|Contemporary Chinese depiction of the destruction of opium under Commissioner Lin.]]
After the opium was surrendered, trade was restarted on the strict condition that no more opium be shipped into China. Looking for a way to effectively police foreign trade and purge corruption, Lin and his advisers decided to reform the existing bond system. Under this system, a foreign captain and the ''Cohong'' merchant who had purchased the goods off of his ship swore that the vessel carried no illegal goods. Upon examining the records of the port, Lin was infuriated to find that in the 20 years since opium had been declared illegal, not a single infraction had been reported.<ref>Fay (2000) pp. 192–193.</ref> As a consequence, Lin demanded that all foreign merchants and Qing officials sign a new bond promising not to deal in opium under penalty of death.<ref name="coleman">{{Cite book |last=Coleman |first=Anthony |url=https://archive.org/details/millenniumthousa00cole/page/243 |title=Millennium |publisher=Transworld |year=1999 |isbn=0-593-04478-9 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/millenniumthousa00cole/page/243 243–244]}}</ref> The British government opposed their signing of the bond, feeling that it violated the principle of free trade, but some merchants who did not trade in opium (such as [[Olyphant & Co.]]) were willing to sign against Elliot's orders. Trade in regular goods continued unabated, and the scarcity of opium caused by the seizure of the foreign warehouses caused the [[black market]] to flourish.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Doing Business with China: Early American Trading Houses |url=https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/heard/doing-business-with-china.html |access-date=24 May 2017 |website=www.library.hbs.edu}}</ref> Some newly arrived merchant ships were able to learn of the ban on opium before they entered the Pearl River estuary, and so they unloaded their cargoes at Lintin Island. The opportunity caused by the sharp rise in the price of opium was seized upon by some of the ''Cohong'' trading houses and smugglers, who were able to evade commissioner Lin's efforts and smuggled more opium into China. Superintendent Elliot was aware of the smugglers' activities on Lintin and was under orders to stop them, but feared that any action by the Royal Navy could spark a war and withheld his ships.<ref name="China: The First Opium War" />