First Opium War (1839-1842): Britain, China and the Opium Trade

The First Opium War was fought between Britain and Qing-dynasty China from 1839 to 1842. It began after the Chinese government tried to suppress the smuggling of opium, much of it carried by British merchants from India, and confiscated and destroyed British-held stocks at Canton. Britain’s victory forced China to cede Hong Kong and open its ports, beginning a long era of foreign privilege that Chinese historians see as the start of a “century of humiliation”.

Background: trade at Canton

From 1757 the Qing court restricted European trade to the single southern port of Canton (Guangzhou), under what is called the Canton System. Foreign merchants could deal only with a guild of licensed Chinese firms, the Cohong, and had to live in a narrow strip of warehouses outside the city walls known as the Thirteen Factories. Britain’s attempts to change these rules through diplomacy, including the Macartney Embassy of 1793, had failed.

Britain bought huge quantities of Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, but China wanted few British goods in return, so the balance had to be paid in silver. Opium offered a solution. The British East India Company held a monopoly on opium production in Bengal and sold the drug at auction in Calcutta to private “country traders”, who carried it to the Chinese coast. Chinese smugglers then distributed it inland, and the silver they paid flowed back to finance British purchases of tea.

Opium had been banned in China since 1729 and its import prohibited again in 1796 and later, but enforcement was weak and corrupt officials took bribes. Imports grew from roughly 4,000 chests a year around 1800 to some 30,000-40,000 chests a year by the late 1830s, each chest holding about 60 kilograms of opium. By the 1830s, China’s silver was flowing out rather than in, which worried the Qing government because the copper coins used in daily life lost value against silver, raising the real burden of taxes.

In 1834 the East India Company lost its monopoly on British trade with China, and the number of private traders grew. A British official, Lord Napier, arrived the same year to demand direct dealings with Chinese officials; the attempt ended in a stand-off and Napier’s death from fever. At the Qing court, officials debated whether to legalise and tax opium or to suppress it entirely. The Daoguang Emperor chose suppression.

The drug’s social cost was real. Opium smoking had spread from wealthy households to soldiers, clerks and labourers, and officials reported that addiction was weakening the army and draining families’ savings. For the court, the trade was therefore a moral, financial and security problem at once.

Lin Zexu and the crisis of 1839

At the end of 1838 the emperor appointed Lin Zexu, a respected official with a record of fighting opium in central China, as imperial commissioner. Lin arrived in Canton on 10 March 1839. He arrested Chinese dealers, demanded that foreign merchants surrender all their opium and sign bonds promising never to import it again, and on 24 March confined the foreign community in the Thirteen Factories.

The British Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot, persuaded the merchants to hand over their opium to him, promising that the British government would compensate them. In this way 20,283 chests were surrendered. Lin had the opium destroyed in public at Humen in June 1839, an event described in the article on the destruction of opium at Humen. He also wrote a famous open letter to Queen Victoria appealing to her conscience to end the trade.

Tension rose further after drunken British sailors killed a villager, Lin Weixi, at Kowloon in July 1839, and Elliot refused to hand over suspects. Small naval clashes followed at Kowloon in September and at Chuenpi (Chuanbi) in November 1839.

In London, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston decided to send an expeditionary force to obtain compensation, security for British merchants and a treaty. The opposition attacked the decision, and in April 1840 a motion censuring the government was defeated in the House of Commons by 271 votes to 262. During the debate Gladstone condemned a war “more unjust in its origin” than any he knew of.

The expedition, made up of warships, troop transports and soldiers from Britain and India, reached China in June 1840. It blockaded Canton, occupied Dinghai on the island of Zhoushan (Chusan) in early July and sailed north towards Tianjin, alarming the court. The emperor dismissed Lin and sent the official Qishan to negotiate.

The war, 1840-1842

In January 1841 British forces stormed the forts at Chuenpi; the East India Company’s iron steamship Nemesis, able to operate in shallow water, destroyed numerous war junks. Elliot and Qishan agreed the Convention of Chuenpi, which would have ceded Hong Kong, and British forces occupied Hong Kong Island on 26 January 1841. Both governments rejected the deal. Qishan was disgraced, and Palmerston replaced Elliot with Sir Henry Pottinger. Palmerston was unimpressed by Hong Kong, which he dismissed as a barren island, and wanted greater concessions.

Fighting resumed in late February 1841, when the British destroyed the Bogue forts. By May they were poised to take Canton, when local officials paid a ransom of 6 million dollars. At Sanyuanli, just outside Canton, militia from local villages confronted a British detachment, an episode later celebrated in China as popular resistance.

Pottinger moved the war north. British forces captured Xiamen (Amoy) in August 1841 and Ningbo in October. A Qing counter-offensive against Ningbo in March 1842 failed. In the summer of 1842 the British entered the Yangtze River, took Wusong and Shanghai, and on 21 July stormed Zhenjiang, where the Manchu garrison fought to the last and many of its members killed their families and themselves rather than surrender. The capture of Zhenjiang cut the Grand Canal, the vital supply route to Beijing.

Why the Qing lost

The imbalance of military technology was decisive. British warships carried heavy guns and could bombard coastal forts from positions the defenders could not reach, while steamers such as Nemesis towed sailing ships and moved troops upriver regardless of the wind. British infantry carried percussion or flintlock muskets in disciplined formations, and their artillery was far superior to the old cannon in Qing forts.

The Qing army was large but scattered across the empire in small garrisons, poorly paid and trained for policing rather than war against a modern navy. Communication with Beijing was slow, and local commanders often sent the court misleading reports of victories, so the emperor long underestimated the danger. Disease, however, hit the invaders hard: hundreds of British and Indian soldiers died of malaria, dysentery and cholera, especially during the occupation of Zhoushan in 1840.

The Treaty of Nanking

With British warships off Nanjing, Qing negotiators led by Qiying agreed to terms. The Treaty of Nanking was signed aboard HMS Cornwallis on 29 August 1842. China ceded Hong Kong Island, opened Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai to British trade and residence, abolished the Cohong and agreed to pay 21 million silver dollars. The treaty said nothing about opium, whose trade continued and later grew.

Key people

• Lin Zexu (1785-1850): imperial commissioner whose campaign against opium triggered the war; exiled to Xinjiang after his dismissal and later honoured as a national hero.
• Daoguang Emperor (reigned 1820-1850): the Qing ruler who ordered the suppression of opium and later accepted defeat.
• Charles Elliot (1801-1875): British Superintendent of Trade who took responsibility for the merchants’ opium and negotiated the rejected Convention of Chuenpi.
• Sir Henry Pottinger (1789-1856): British plenipotentiary from 1841, who led the northern campaign, signed the treaty and became the first governor of Hong Kong.
• Lord Palmerston (1784-1865): British Foreign Secretary who sent the expedition.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1839, 10 March: Lin Zexu arrives in Canton.
• 1839, 3-25 June: Confiscated opium is destroyed at Humen.
• 1839, 3 November: Naval clash at Chuenpi.
• 1840, April: The House of Commons narrowly backs the government’s China policy.
• 1840, July: British forces occupy Dinghai on Zhoushan.
• 1841, 26 January: British forces occupy Hong Kong Island.
• 1841, May: Canton pays a ransom to avoid capture.
• 1842, 21 July: British forces storm Zhenjiang.
• 1842, 29 August: Treaty of Nanking signed.

Legacy

The war showed the military weakness of the Qing state and opened China to foreign trade, missionaries and diplomats on terms set by the victors. The United States and France soon obtained similar treaties, and further disputes led to the Second Opium War of 1856-1860. In China the war is remembered as the beginning of modern history and of foreign domination, and Lin Zexu is celebrated for his stand against the drug trade.

The war also stimulated new thinking in China. Lin Zexu had collected translations of Western works on geography and current affairs, and his friend Wei Yuan used them to compile the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (1843), which urged China to learn from the West’s technology in order to resist it. In Britain the war remained controversial, and the opium trade faced growing moral criticism in the later nineteenth century, although it did not end until the early twentieth century.

Why it matters

The First Opium War marked a turning point in relations between China and the West. It created the treaty-port system and British Hong Kong, and its memory continues to influence how China views Western power.