Philip Harling

There has long been broad agreement in the West as well as the East that opium was one of the chief causes of the Anglo-Chinese wars of the mid-nineteenth century (1839–42, 1856–60). Those wars were also about other things, of course. They were trade wars that reflected the clash between the British Empire’s commitment to global free trade and the Qing Empire’s commitment to controlling foreign trade through the highly restrictive ‘Canton system’.¹ They were culture wars that reflected the clash between the British Empire’s insistence on diplomatic equality between sovereign states and the Qing Empire’s insistence on treating all ‘barbarian’ states as tributaries that needed to acknowledge the supremacy of the Chinese emperor – even Britain, the global superpower of the age.² This diplomatic culture clash led to what Rutherford Alcock, British man on the spot in Canton (Guangzhou), indignantly called ‘a never-ending series of petty outrages and contumelious acts’ by the Qing mandarins in the treaty ports conceded after the first Opium War.³ Palmerston wasted no time in making these indignities a pretext to go to war a second time, and then to call a snap ‘Chinese election’ in 1857. Predictably enough, voters rewarded their prime minister’s bellicose refusal to make what he ostentatiously called ‘an abject submission to the barbarians’⁴ with a larger majority in the House of Commons. Thus did Britain’s expanding mid-century electorate sanction the idea that these were wars provoked first and foremost by the Qing Empire’s contemptuous refusal to acknowledge Britain’s status as the world’s top nation and greatest civilisation.

The historical consensus, however, has long been that the two Anglo-Chinese wars of the mid-century were also wars about opium, the British imperial commodity at the heart of the Anglo-Chinese antagonism.⁵ And British imperial opium, far from being a token of ‘free-trade imperialism’, was processed through a highly sophisticated and tightly controlled Indian government monopoly.⁶ The East India Company and then the British Raj produced an enormous quantity of opium to meet a seemingly insatiable Chinese demand – from 100,000 kilograms of it in 1810 to 3.6 million kilograms by 1885. Opium contributed hugely to British India’s trade surplus, accounting for a third of all export earnings by the 1850s, and over a fifth of the Raj’s annual revenue by 1860. For much of the nineteenth century, moreover, opium was the only British imperial import for which Chinese demand was enough to help offset the trade imbalance caused by the even less satiable British demand for Chinese tea.⁷

In 1839, as part of its effort more strictly to enforce its longstanding anti-opium laws, the Chinese imperial government confiscated from British merchants and destroyed over 800,000 kilograms of opium, worth over £2 million at the time (£200 million today). This action triggered a British military invasion that ended in a humiliating defeat for the Qing empire. Opium smuggling grew apace, and after the second Anglo-Chinese war, the opium trade was effectively legalised through a schedule of tariff duties. Opium smoking became much more widespread in China in the second half of the century, as the legalisation of opium that had been forced by British arms fostered extensive poppy-growing and opium-processing within China itself. Domestic Chinese competition rather than ethical scruples eventually stopped the flow of Indian opium into China. The British could consent to the 1912 Treaty of Tianjin that finally declared an end to the Indian opium trade in China because by that time Indian opium had dwindled to a mere ten per cent of the Chinese market. By the early twentieth century, opium had turned into a Chinese problem in terms of production as well as consumption. Its solution owed next to nothing to Britain or to any other western power, and virtually everything to the new Communist government’s brutal suppression campaign of the early 1950s.

Given these facts, it is not surprising that in Chinese official history the Anglo-Chinese wars are treated as a conspiracy to bring the country to its knees through drugs and violence. It is no less surprising that to most western historians today, they are a particularly breathtaking example of Victorian hypocrisy – the chief proof that, as Philippa Levine notes, ‘the age of reform and of high morals was also quite palpably an age of rapacity’.⁸ Indeed, the Opium Wars provide but one of innumerable examples in which the ostensibly moral foundations of the early-Victorian state ‘at home’ led to dubious moral consequences ‘out there’ – within and far beyond the empire. Free trade was, of course, one of the central pillars on which those foundations rested. It built a laissez-faire shield round the Victorian economy, and in turn shielded the state and its stewards against the charges of sectional-interest brokerage that had long been at the root of the British radical critique of ‘Old Corruption’. Free trade thus became central to the legitimacy of the metropolitan state in the age of reform. It evolved into a hallmark of disinterested governance on the part of a still narrow political elite that was held to account by a broader electorate after 1832, but which also held itself to account through a conspicuous dedication to ‘good government’ that patrician statesmen hoped might stave off an even more dramatic broadening of that reformed electorate.⁹ While free trade was regarded as a cardinal virtue at home, however, its global effects were far more destructive. It devastated the sugar economy of the British Caribbean by exposing it to open competition with Cuban and Brazilian slave sugar, for instance;¹⁰ it exacerbated catastrophic famines in Ireland in the 1840s and India in the 1870s and 1890s;¹¹ and it provided the chief rationale for the two squalid wars with China that were (paradoxically and hypocritically) fought in support of the Indian government’s lucrative monopoly of the opium trade.¹²

There is still much to be understood about how foundational Victorian values such as free trade became corrupted as they travelled round the world – prime examples of what Priya Satia has memorably called ‘the apparent ideological contradiction of “liberal imperialism”’, which was ‘grounded in a vision of history understood as necessarily progress-oriented’, but which left in its wake a vast, global toll of ‘wreckage’ that ‘was, famously, unintended’.¹³ With respect to the opium question, the corruption in practice of that purportedly liberatory shibboleth, global free trade, is all too plain to see. For the opium trade made the Victorian British empire the biggest, most violent narco-empire the world has ever known.¹⁴ But just as that trade was waxing, so too was Britons’ tendency to justify their burgeoning empire on the liberal premise that it was a force for global good. Here was a seeming contradiction too glaring entirely to ignore. Thus the opium trade to China and the wars that facilitated it raised serious ethical questions, and, indeed, there was plenty of public debate about the opium issue in Britain during and between the wars. That debate tended to pit evangelical and missionary opponents of the opium trade against a broader and more disparate group of commentators who, to varying degrees, felt that the trade was legitimate and that opium was not as physically harmful as the anti-opiumists made it out to be, and who claimed various kinds of insider knowledge and expertise in advancing their arguments.

There are three points to stress here about the opium debate in Britain. The first is that there was significant disagreement about the physical effects of regular opium use. The second is that while anti-opiumists emphasised Britain’s Christian responsibility to stop the opium trade, the trade’s apologists stressed that the moral responsibility for opium use and abuse in China ultimately rested not with British or Indian producers but with Chinese consumers and the Chinese government. The third and final point is not about how the two sides in the British opium debate differed from each other, but about what they had in common. Both British critics and British supporters of the opium trade predicated their arguments on the assumption that China was significantly lower than Britain in the scale of civilisational progress, and that a viable solution to the opium problem meant that the Chinese government and the Chinese people had to become more recognisably ‘British’ in various ways.

On one level, of course, the opposing sides in the long-running British debate about Chinese opium voiced competing discourses of progress. To British anti-opiumists, the only guarantor of progress was the prohibition of the opium trade. To their British counterparts, progress rested on a fully open and legal opium trade limited not by government action but by Chinese moderation. But these British antagonists in the opium debate had one important thing in common – theirs was unapologetically unsolicited advice offered to the Chinese from what they all believed to be the top rung of a civilisational ladder on which they and their fellow Britons solely stood. In this sense, the opium debate in Britain provides some especially vivid examples of the plasticity of stadial logic – the habitual tendency to assign different peoples to different stages of civilisational development. This was the kind of logic the mid-Victorians instinctively reached for in justifying the British empire and explaining Britain’s global ascendancy to themselves. As Peter Mandler has pointed out, British racism at mid-century remained more cultural and historicist than biological. But mid-Victorians comfortably settled into the opinion that the timescale for the ‘improvement’ of non-white peoples was much longer than their abolitionist parents had thought¹⁵ – whether those peoples were assumed never to have attained any of the features of proper civilisation, or who, like the Chinese, had once modelled some of those features, but had since purportedly regressed. Having ascended (as they thought) to the top of the civilisational order, mid-Victorian Britons pointed to the opium trade as an index of China’s civilisational decline – often in ways that were meant to absolve Britain’s deep complicity in that trade.

The different sides in the debate about the British opium trade to China were not weighed down by many facts. Even today, there is plenty we do not know about how morphine acts on the body.¹⁶ What was widely recognised at the time was that opium was a potent analgesic, cough and fever suppressant, and anti-diarrheal. In the days before aspirin, it was widely used as a pain-killer, not only in Asia, but in Britain, Europe and North America. Opium was an active ingredient in Dover’s Powder, chlorodyne, Godfrey’s Cordial (a children’s opiate based on laudanum) and several more of the West’s most popular patent medicines, and its use was completely unregulated in Britain until the Pharmacy Act of 1868.¹⁷ It was no less widely recognised at the time that opium was highly addictive, and that withdrawal was accompanied by symptoms that could prove fatal, including severe stomach cramps, vomiting, excruciating pain to head and limbs, severe anxiety and paranoia. Impoverished addicts were especially vulnerable, as they often went without food to pay for their opium.¹⁸ In West as well as East, the line between the medical and social usage of opium was often blurred, and just like Thomas De Quincey, the ‘English opium eater’, many Chinese addicts would have first used opium as a pain-reliever.¹⁹

In India as well as Britain, opium was routinely ingested in the form of pills or drunk as a powder dissolved in liquid. Yet the opium ‘problem’ was thought to be peculiarly Chinese, because Chinese users routinely smoked rather than swallowed opium. In India as in Britain, the smoking of opium was ‘generally looked down upon as a low and vicious habit’.²⁰ But there is no medical evidence to suggest that smoking opium is potentially more harmful than swallowing it. Indeed, the contrary is probably true, as most Indian opium brought into China as well as most domestically cultivated Chinese opium had a relatively low morphine content, and most of the morphia was either lost from pipe fumes or exhaled. It is impossible to gauge just how many Chinese smoked opium. Contemporary Chinese as well as British estimates varied wildly. But there is no doubt that over the course of the nineteenth century, its habitual use spread inland from the southern and eastern coasts, and from the elite to the peasantry.²¹ Peasants probably smoked on a massive scale no earlier than the 1870s, when domestic Chinese opium production began rapidly to increase. A widely accepted modern estimate is that by the 1880s perhaps ten per cent of the Chinese population at least occasionally smoked opium, with heavy smokers accounting for between one and three per cent of the population.²² But such nationwide estimates probably conceal more than they reveal, as anecdotal evidence from the last quarter of the nineteenth century suggests much higher levels of opium use in certain parts of the country (such as Shanxi or Gansu province) and among certain groups of manual labourers (such as rickshaw-pullers, boatmen and stone-cutters), for whom opium dulled the pain of prolonged physical labour and enhanced work capacity over short intervals.²³

There is no doubt that opium abuse posed a serious social problem in late-Qing China. But it is virtually impossible to measure the scale of the problem. And indeed, recent trends in opium studies suggest that the scale of the problem can be exaggerated. Far from a contradiction in terms, ‘moderate’ opium use was probably the norm, not the exception. Opium houses were not the hell holes of literary imagination, but often respectable sites of overwhelmingly male sociability (like the English pub or the American saloon) in which typically moderate amounts of opium were shared, along with tea, fruit and sweets; even some heavy smokers could continue in their habit for years without seriously impairing their health, provided they had the financial means to support it. Indeed, opium was often prepared in intricate rituals similar to tea ceremonies, in which the ceremonial aspect itself was a constraint on excessive use.²⁴ As Julia Lovell has noted, Qing subjects smoked opium for about as many reasons, in as wide a variety of settings, and to a similarly widely varying extent, as Europeans drank alcohol.²⁵

There were plenty of British observers at the time who insisted that the horrors of opium were greatly exaggerated. The barrister Samuel Warren, for instance, pointed out that anti-opiumists presented their readers with the spectre of ‘millions of De Quinceys created in China, by the opium merchants, and represented in stages of suffering and frequency of death, infinitely transcending all that has been described by that accurate and minute … observer of his own sensations and sufferings’. Yet, as Warren pointed out, De Quincey himself was still giving ‘the public frequent proofs of his being … alive, and in the full vigour of his extraordinary intellect’, almost a quarter-century after his public admission of a prodigious opium habit.²⁶ Now Warren was a skilled casuist, in the pay of the leading British opium firm, Jardine Matheson. But several British military men who had served in China reached similar benign conclusions. ‘From the experience which I had in constantly watching its use’, noted Captain Arthur Cunynghame, ‘I am of opinion that, taken as it almost invariably is, in great moderation, it is by no means noxious to the constitution, but quite the reverse’, and did Chinese smokers ‘no more harm than a moderate quantity of wine does to us’.²⁷ Like Cunynghame, Dr Duncan McPherson had served in the first Opium War, and he was one of very few westerners of his generation not only publicly to admit to having smoked opium himself, but to admit that it was an enjoyable experience. ‘I had the curiosity to try the effects of a few pipes upon myself’, he noted,

and must confess I am not at all surprised at the great partiality and craving appetite always present with those who are long accustomed to its use … [F]ancy is awakened, and creates new and bright associations, the pleasurable scenes of former life are again recalled, … [and] the future is full of delightful anticipations, whilst the most difficult schemes appear already accomplished, and crowned with success. Under its operation every task seems easy and every labour light.

McPherson likewise concluded that moderate opium use was not only possible but beneficial. ‘[L]ike all other powerful stimulants and narcotics’, he warned, ‘it must ultimately produce effects injurious to the constitution’. But the Chinese certainly did not appear to him a nation of addicts. ‘[W]ere we led away by the popular opinion that the habitual use of opium injures the health and shortens life’, he concluded, ‘we should find the Chinese a shriveled, and emaciated … race. On the contrary, … we find them to be a powerful, muscular, and athletic people, and the lower orders more intelligent, and far superior in mental acquirements, to those of corresponding rank in our own country’.²⁸

Such benign views were countered by anti-opiumists, chiefly clergymen and missionaries, who routinely insisted that opium smoking was almost inevitably deadly. This was a view championed by the Reverend Algernon Thelwall, whose influential pamphlet on the Iniquities of the Opium Trade was serialised in The Times in 1839. Estimating that ‘he who begins to use this baneful drug at twenty years of age can never expect to reach his fortieth year’, Thelwall concluded that nearly two million Chinese had been ‘murdered by the rise of the pernicious drug’ within the past two decades – ‘or 99,300 each year!’ and that the current trade of 34,000 chests per year of opium into China was ‘abundantly sufficient to ruin the health and shorten the days of no less than 2,980,000 individuals’.²⁹ Julius Jeffreys similarly estimated that there were at least three million opium addicts in China – a number equal to the entire population of Scotland – and that of these, at least one-third were in an ‘unsalvageable’ state of addiction.

[W]hat a picture we have here! 500,000 of our fellow-men in the last stage of a fatal vice – on the sure and short road to a wretched death and a dishonoured grave; spreading misery, and vice, and ruin on … hundreds of thousands of families which might else have been happy and comparatively pure. A million more hastening to fill up the blanks made by sudden death or utter beggary in the foremost ranks, and a million and a half pressing hard on the heels of these.³⁰

Other anti-opiumists shared Thelwall’s conviction that ‘opium-smoking is a sort of inclined plane, down which he who ventures to slide a little way is tolerably sure to go to the bottom’.³¹ The only significant difference among them was in judging the relative speed with which opium smoking would kill.³² Critics agreed that:

when once the Chinaman enters in this course, he finds himself on a plane inclined more or less according to the varieties of constitution; and the testimony of those who have had the best opportunities of judging is, that this descent is all but inevitable from the region of enjoyment that is said to be a terrestrial heaven to the depths of a terrestrial hell.³³

Even some observers who were fairly sympathetic to the anti-opium cause felt that these claims of opium’s inevitable deadliness were seriously exaggerated. Benjamin Hobson, a medical missionary in Canton, was no friend of opium. He ‘[did] not fail strongly to advise the Chinese not to use it, both on physical and moral grounds’, because ‘its tendency is to debase the mind, to blunt the conscience’, and ‘unduly excite, and subsequently enervate, the brain and nervous system, now unequal to their functions, except by a constant supply of a false stimulus, which takes the place of wholesome food and drink’. Nevertheless, he noted that he saw many patients who had smoked it moderately for years, even decades, without suffering any serious ill effects. Indeed, he concluded, while ‘opium is probably more seductive and tenacious in its grasp than alcohol, … I should certainly affirm that it was not so frequently fatal to life, nor so fruitful of disease and crime, as are intoxicating drinks in Great Britain’.³⁴ Apologists for the opium trade more insistently made the point that opium in China was like alcohol in Britain. ‘It is, in fact, not the use but the abuse which is hurtful’, noted the travel writer Hugh Murray. ‘Men of all ages and countries solace their cares with some intoxicating material or other; and whether this be brandy or wine, as in France, ale, as in England, whisky, as in Ireland, … or opium, as in China, is a matter of comparative indifference’.³⁵

The abuse of alcohol, rare in China, was of course everywhere to be seen in mid-Victorian Britain.³⁶ And the abuse of alcohol was, according to this logic, more socially damaging than the abuse of opium, because while opium addicts typically reclined in a stupor, drunkards were all too likely to do violence to others. ‘Smoking a little opium daily is like taking a pint or two of ale, or a few glasses of wine daily’, noted Thomas Taylor Meadows, a government interpreter in Hong Kong.

Smoking more opium is like excessive brandy and gin drinking, leading to delirium tremens and premature death. After frequent consideration of the subject during thirteen years, the last two spent at home, I can only say, that, although the substances are different, I can, as to the morality of producing, selling, and consuming them, see no difference at all: while the only difference I can observe in the consequences of consumption, is that the opium smoker is not so violent, so maudlin, or so disgusting as the drunkard.³⁷

As the renowned physician Sir Benjamin Brodie put it, ‘the opium-eater is in a passive state, satisfied with his own dreamy condition while under the influence of the drug. He is useless, but not mischievous. It is quite otherwise with alcoholic liquours’.³⁸ The lack of anything close to a consensus about the relative harmfulness of opium thus made it easier for Britons with ties to the opium traffic to justify that traffic to themselves.

British opponents and apologists were just as divided over the moral responsibility for the opium trade as they were over the relative harmfulness of opium smoking. The trade’s foes insisted that the trade itself and the wars fought on its behalf were a national sin, a violation of Britain’s Christian duties in the world. Thus it was that the evangelical leader Lord Ashley (later the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) could not ‘rejoice in our [military successes] in China; we have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary and unfair struggles in the records of history’. The young William Gladstone likewise noted in his diary that ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and have not read of’.³⁹ The Times itself likened the opium trade to the slave trade, and insisted that ‘if this opium business were thoroughly and generally understood’, a

high-toned public outcry like that which hunted down the abominations of the Guinea slavers, so long the opprobrium of British commerce, would forthwith rise up against it among all parties in politics and all denominations of Christians, till not a trace of it remained, except the remorseful recollection of its enormities.⁴⁰

When such an outcry failed to materialise, opponents of the trade noted the bitter irony that while the Royal Navy was intercepting slavers off the African coast, British opium clippers were smuggling tens of thousands of chests of opium into China each year, with the connivance of the British government. ‘Where is the consistency and humanity of a nation’, queried the American anti-opiumist Nathan Allen, ‘supporting armed vessels on the coast of Africa to intercept and rescue a few hundred of her sons from foreign bondage, when, at the same time, she is forging chains to hold millions on the coast of China in a far more hopeless bondage?’⁴¹ Like the slave trade in Africa, critics argued, the opium trade was a drag on the growth of Britain’s ‘legitimate’ commerce with China, as it was ‘drugging to death the man whom we are hoping to see enter our shop daily, purse in hand!’⁴² Anti-opiumists likewise noted the irony that ‘we grow poppy in our Indian territories to poison the people of China, in return for a wholesome beverage which they prepare, almost exclusively for us’.⁴³ While tea and silk were ‘bringing increased comfort and happiness to nearly every family in the United Kingdom’, Britain’s ‘return for these valuable commodities is made chiefly of opium, and if we follow that article to the homes of its millions of consumers, we find that its mission is … to lure its victims to a premature and utterly wretched end, and to plunge their families into destitution’.⁴⁴

Finally, anti-opiumists insisted, the trade made it much harder to sell to the Chinese not only cheap manufactures, but also Christianity. ‘It does seem most anomalous and contradictory’, rued one evangelical periodical,

that the English should send to China cases of Bibles and chests of opium – the Bread of Life and deadly poison; that sons of Britain should wend their way to China as medical missionaries, as preachers of the Gospel, and translators of the Christian Scriptures, and that other men from the same land should carry to China this pestiferous drug … and grow rich by the gains of it.⁴⁵

Yet so it was, and ‘every missionary informs us that the people point in scorn to the opium chest, and tell him to carry it away before he brings the Bible’.⁴⁶ The unnoticed irony here was that the same ‘unequal’ treaties that legitimated the opium trade in China also legitimated and greatly facilitated evangelisation efforts, as they granted British missionaries freedom of movement throughout China.⁴⁷

Apologists for the opium trade countered that the moral responsibility was all on the Chinese side, and laid the blame squarely on Qing misgovernment. First of all, they insisted, the Qing policy of opium prohibition was ineffectual. Given the seemingly insatiable Chinese demand for Indian opium, prohibition was simply an invitation to smuggling. Chinese smokers would have their opium one way or another, so it was far wiser to tax opium than to forbid it. ‘Whenever habits induced a people to desire a certain commodity it was not in the power of a Government or Legislature to prohibit the general use of that commodity’, the Earl of Albemarle told the House of Lords in defence of the opium trade. ‘The only way to check the consumption of a deleterious article was by the diffusion of education or the imposition of moderate duties’. Prohibition simply led to rampant smuggling.⁴⁸ Other commentators suggested that the Chinese had to look no farther than India (or, for that matter, Burma or Ceylon) where opium-eating was tightly controlled by high excise taxes. Indeed, they added, the Chinese government’s refusal to tax opium simply meant an even bigger windfall for the Government of India, which in the sale of opium to Chinese consumers had found its sole major source of revenue that did not fall on hard-pressed Indian peasants.⁴⁹ Thus the Examiner noted that the Qing government need only look at the windfall that the Government of India reaped from the taxation of opium to conclude that it ‘might easily by a moderate duty control and restrict the consumption of opium while they filled their exchequer’ – yet the Chinese stubbornly refused to follow this Indian example.⁵⁰

Finally, according to the apologists for the opium trade, prohibition was a potent source of Qing corruption. The illicit trade in opium would have been impossible without the collusion of Chinese officials, who were up to their elbows in opium until the emperor’s sudden clampdown in the late 1830s. ‘[T]he well-known venality of the mandarins is such’, noted the British military man K. J. Mackenzie, ‘that it will not surprise my readers when I say, that I never entered a mandarin’s house without finding quantities of opium. This will show the error some have fallen into, in supposing that the practice is not universal, and that it is not connived at by government officers’.⁵¹ ‘Instead of foreigners imposing upon the Chinese the importation of opium as a condition of trade’, added another British observer, ‘it was the Chinese themselves who insisted on its being supplied them. Boats belonging to the Custom-house at Canton were engaged in the traffic, and the Governor of Canton himself … employed his own boat to fetch it’.⁵² ‘The connivance of the [Chinese] authorities … proceeded a step beyond mere remissness in executing the laws’, added the Earl of Selborne. ‘The cruizers of their preventive service were often directly engaged in the contraband traffic; their mandarins and custom-house officers received regular fees from native smugglers, and sometimes granted regular licences for the passage of the smuggled goods’.⁵³ The ‘English opium eater’ himself, Thomas De Quincey, concluded that ‘China has … forfeited her claim to any redress from her long collusion with the wrongdoers, whom now in caprice she accuses’.⁵⁴ Britons had long since begun to congratulate themselves on having eliminated ‘Old Corruption’ within an administrative system that had reformed itself – and that was now answerable to a gradually democratising electorate of upstanding householders. So they shifted blame for the opium problem to Qing corruption and the mandarins’ despotic misgovernment of a downtrodden people – a people who were, in any case, purportedly far from fit to govern themselves, because China had always been authoritarian and because too many Chinese could not so much as govern their own craving for opium.

The one thing that British critics and British supporters of the opium trade held in common was the assumption that China had badly regressed in the civilisational scale, and that the key to solving the opium problem was for the Chinese to develop some of the habits that had brought Britain to the top of that scale. There was widespread agreement that the opium problem was proof of China’s decline, as was the ease with which British and then Anglo-French forces defeated China in two wars. Julia Lovell and James Hevia have made clear what an indelible impression these conflicts, frequently dismissed as ‘little wars’ in the English-language literature, made on the Chinese, most notably in the destruction of the emperor’s Summer Palace, whose ruins remain a vivid monument to colonialism.⁵⁵ (‘When we first entered the gardens’ of the Summer Palace, recalled the future Commander-in-Chief of the British Army Garnet Wolseley, ‘they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th of October [1860], leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings’.⁵⁶) Gunpowder, paper-making, block-printing, silk-spinning, canal-building, navigation at sea, porcelain production – in all these and many more respects the Chinese had become civilised far in advance of Europeans. But these achievements were now centuries in the past, and the seemingly universal assumption was that China had long since been in decline while British civilisation continued to progress by leaps and bounds.⁵⁷

Thus Britons on both sides of the opium debate leant heavily on stadial logic in explaining the Chinese conflict to themselves, and assumed a civilisational hierarchy in which Britain had risen to the top as China continued to fall. While disinterestedness, ‘good government’, and broader political accountability prevailed at home, according to this reasoning, the Qing mandarins only grew more corrupt and despotic and the Chinese people more abject, servile, and themselves corrupted by opium addiction. The origins of both wars were matters of controversy in Britain. But once the shooting started, there was broad agreement that the Qing mandarins needed to be forced to negotiate with Britain as a righteous global hegemon rather than a mere tributary, chiefly because Britain had long since surpassed China in civilisational terms, loath though the mandarins were to acknowledge it. Thus, as The Times put it toward the end of the second Opium War,

the real question at issue appears to be whether we shall continue our intercourse with China on our terms or on hers. Our terms are those on which we communicate with all nations of the world – simplicity, frankness, hospitality, high principle, and equality, as between gentlemen. The Chinese, on the contrary, insist on keeping up the illusion of an unapproachable Sovereign, an irresponsible Central Government, and the not less startling illusion of an infinitely superior morality and sense of decorum.⁵⁸

By this time there was broad agreement in Britain that these Qing illusions needed to be shattered so that China might finally be ‘opened’ to external trade and civilisational progress. There was similarly broad agreement that the Chinese needed to be forced to open more of their ports to western traders for the sake of their own civilisational advancement; the restrictive Canton system was a hallmark of Chinese stagnation in the dawning era of global free trade. For this reason, according to the British naval officer John Bingham,

it is consoling, under the sufferings which the obstinacy and perfidious conduct of their government compel us to inflict upon the people, to reflect that the contest now in progress must result in throwing open the vast empire of China to a more intimate communication with Europeans than has ever existed; and thus while it benefits both them and ourselves, in a commercial point of view, must, under God, be the means of elevating them from their present degradation to a state of real civilisation.⁵⁹

James Hevia has written powerfully about the violent ways in which the British taught ‘English lessons’ to the Chinese on the related subjects of British military hegemony and global free trade.⁶⁰ But there were ‘English lessons’ to be taught on the narrower subject of opium smoking, as well. Proponents of the opium trade insisted that the proper solution to China’s opium problem was a time-tested British one: clean government and more efficient taxation. Smuggling would end and demand would fall to manageable limits if the mandarins stopped colluding in the opium trade and imposed an effective tax on imported opium.⁶¹ Finally, advocates of the trade argued, Chinese subjects no less than their rulers needed to be made to learn the self-restraint that was a hallmark of truly progressive societies; legalising opium would help them to do so, just as Britons had become more sober despite – perhaps in part even because of – the free and legal sale of hard liquor. The British foes of opium were no less committed to the virtues of what they perceived to be British self-restraint. But their arguments for prohibition were all too often predicated on the assumption that the Chinese were not capable of self-restraint – the government too corrupt and the people too depraved to be able to save themselves. As heir to an opium fortune turned anti-opium reformer, Donald Matheson, put it, ‘the Chinese Government are morally and physically helpless—the Chinese people are equally so for throwing off this fatal habit, which has fastened on the very vitals of the nation, and under which they groan, destitute of the moral and Christian energy that might break its thralldom’.⁶² The English lesson here was that the British had to save the Chinese from themselves by prohibiting the export of Indian opium.

Of course, prohibition never happened. A tax on opium did happen. But when it finally came, in 1858, it proved to be yet another lesson in hypocrisy. The British extracted it at gunpoint, and insisted over strenuous Qing protests that it be set so low as not to impede the flow of Indian opium into China. That flow reached record levels by the mid-1880s, and it was greatly exceeded by the contemporaneous flow of domestic Chinese opium to which opium’s de facto legalisation as a taxable commodity had quickly given rise. Small wonder, then, that from a Chinese perspective, the most obvious ‘English lesson’ to be learnt was that the British could never be trusted.

Thus it was that two of mid-Victorian Britain’s salient moral virtues at home – free trade and clean and efficient government – bred violence, rapine and hypocrisy in Britain’s relationship with China. The ‘opening’ of China to overseas trade was secured by British gunboats, and the opium that long remained by far the most popular British import in China was the product of a tightly controlled government monopoly. At the same time, clean and efficient government became a means to shift the blame for the opium trade from British force of arms to mandarin corruption. By such means were British virtues denatured in their long journey to China.