First Opium War

The First Opium War was fought between the United Kingdom and the Qing Empire of China from 1839 to 1842. It began after the Qing government tried to stamp out the illegal opium trade run largely by British merchants, and Britain responded with military force. At the time the British often called it simply the “war with China” or the Anglo-Chinese War; the name “Opium War” was used by critics even then and became standard later.

The war was fought mostly at sea and along China’s southern and eastern coasts and rivers. Britain’s modern navy, including steam-powered ships, allowed a relatively small force to strike wherever it chose. The Qing army and navy were large but poorly equipped for this kind of war, and local defenders often suffered heavy losses.

The war ended with the Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) in August 1842, the first of what Chinese later called the “unequal treaties”. It forced China to open more ports to foreign trade, pay a large indemnity and hand over Hong Kong Island. Many historians regard the war as a turning point in the relationship between China and the Western powers.

In the eighteenth century tea became a national drink in Britain, and China was the only large source. The Chinese wanted few British goods, so British traders paid mostly in silver. This worried British officials, who did not like the flow of silver out of the country.

The British East India Company, which ruled large parts of India, found a solution. It grew opium poppies in Bengal, controlled the production of opium, and sold it at auction in Calcutta to private merchants, who carried it to China. The Company itself did not sell opium in China, because the Qing had banned it, but it profited from every chest sold. Opium from western India (Malwa) also entered the trade.

Imports grew enormously, from a few thousand chests a year in the late eighteenth century to tens of thousands of chests a year by the late 1830s. The flow of silver reversed: now silver was leaving China to pay for opium. Opium smoking spread from the wealthy to soldiers, officials and labourers, and many families were ruined by addiction.

At the Qing court, officials debated what to do. In 1836 some proposed legalizing and taxing opium; others demanded strict prohibition. The Daoguang Emperor chose prohibition and, at the end of 1838, appointed Lin Zexu, a respected official known for honesty and energy, as imperial commissioner with full powers to end the trade.

Lin arrived in Guangzhou in March 1839. He arrested Chinese dealers, pressed users to give up the drug, and demanded that foreign merchants surrender their opium and promise never to bring more. When they delayed, he blockaded the foreign warehouses (the “factories”) and withdrew their Chinese servants. The British Superintendent of Trade, Captain Charles Elliot, told the merchants to hand over their opium to him, promising that the British government would compensate them. More than 20,000 chests were surrendered.

In June 1839, at Humen near the mouth of the Pearl River, Lin had the opium mixed with salt and lime in trenches and flushed out to sea, a task that took about three weeks. He also wrote a letter to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could allow a poison banned in its own country to be sold to China; it is not clear that the letter ever reached the queen, though it was printed in the British press.

Opium was the immediate cause, but the war also grew from a long conflict over how trade and diplomacy should work. From 1757 the Qing limited Western maritime trade to Guangzhou, under what historians call the Canton system. Foreign merchants could trade only through a group of licensed Chinese merchant houses, the Cohong, had to live in a small area outside the city walls and could not bring their families. They were not allowed to deal directly with Qing officials.

Britain tried to change these rules through diplomacy. The Macartney embassy of 1793 and the Amherst embassy of 1816 both failed. The Qing saw its relations with foreign states through a tradition in which other rulers approached the emperor as a superior, while Britain insisted on treating China as one sovereign state among equals, with open trade and permanent diplomats. Each side saw the other’s claims as arrogant.

In 1834 the East India Company lost its monopoly on British trade with China. Private merchants, led by firms such as Jardine, Matheson & Co., rushed into the trade and lobbied for a tougher policy. The first British Superintendent of Trade, Lord Napier, clashed with Qing authorities that same year. By the late 1830s, merchant interests, ideas of free trade and national honour, and the Qing drive against opium were on a collision course.

In July 1839 drunken British sailors killed a Chinese villager, Lin Weixi, at Kowloon. Lin Zexu demanded that the culprits be handed over for Chinese justice; Elliot refused, holding his own trial instead. Lin cut off supplies to the British, who withdrew from Macau to ships anchored in the harbour of Hong Kong. On 4 September 1839, British vessels exchanged fire with Chinese war junks off Kowloon, and on 3 November a larger clash took place at Chuenpi (Chuanbi) at the mouth of the Pearl River.

In London, the government of Lord Melbourne, with Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary, decided to send an expedition to obtain compensation for the surrendered opium, better terms of trade and diplomatic equality. The decision was controversial. In April 1840 the opposition in the House of Commons moved a censure of the government’s China policy; the young William Gladstone denounced the war as unjust in its origins and a permanent disgrace. The motion was defeated by only nine votes, 271 to 262.

The expeditionary force, including Royal Navy warships, army regiments and many Indian soldiers from the East India Company’s armies, arrived off China in June 1840. It included the Nemesis, an iron-hulled steamship of the East India Company, which could move up shallow rivers against wind and current and became a symbol of Britain’s technological advantage.

The British blockaded the Pearl River and, in July 1840, seized the island of Zhoushan (Chusan) near Ningbo. The fleet then sailed north to the mouth of the Hai River (Peiho) near Tianjin, close enough to alarm Beijing. The emperor dismissed Lin Zexu and sent Qishan to negotiate. In January 1841 Elliot and Qishan agreed the Convention of Chuenpi, which would have given Britain Hong Kong and six million dollars; British forces occupied Hong Kong Island on 26 January 1841. But both governments rejected the agreement: the emperor punished Qishan, and Palmerston dismissed Elliot for asking too little.

Fighting resumed around Guangzhou. British forces destroyed the forts at the Bogue and in May 1841 stood above the city, which paid a ransom of six million dollars to avoid being stormed. At Sanyuanli, just north of the city, local militia gathered and confronted British and Indian troops in a rainstorm. The clash was small in military terms but later became a powerful symbol of popular resistance in Chinese memory.

Elliot’s replacement, Sir Henry Pottinger, arrived in August 1841 and moved the war north. British forces took Xiamen (Amoy), retook Zhoushan, and captured Zhenhai and Ningbo. A Qing counterattack on Ningbo in March 1842 failed with heavy losses. In the spring and summer of 1842 the British took Zhapu, Wusong and Shanghai, then sailed up the Yangzi River.

At Zhenjiang in July 1842, the Manchu garrison fought fiercely; when the city fell, many soldiers and their families killed themselves rather than surrender, and many civilians died. Control of Zhenjiang cut the Grand Canal, the artery that carried grain to Beijing. With British ships approaching Nanjing, the Qing agreed to negotiate.

The Treaty of Nanjing was signed on 29 August 1842 aboard HMS Cornwallis. Qing negotiators, led by Qiying and Yilibu, accepted terms that included an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars, paid in instalments; the opening of five ports to British trade and residence (Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai) with British consuls; the cession of Hong Kong Island to Britain in perpetuity; the abolition of the Cohong monopoly; a fixed, published tariff; and equal forms of official correspondence.

The treaty did not mention opium at all. The drug remained illegal in China, but the trade continued and grew after the war, and it was not legalized until after the Second Opium War (1856–1860).

A supplementary treaty in 1843, the Treaty of the Bogue, added extraterritoriality, under which British subjects accused of crimes would be tried by British officials, and a most-favoured-nation clause, under which any privilege China granted to another power would automatically extend to Britain. The United States (Treaty of Wangxia, 1844) and France (Treaty of Whampoa, 1844) soon obtained similar treaties. Together these agreements created the “unequal treaty” system that shaped China’s foreign relations for a century.

In the short term, the war did not change daily life for most of China’s hundreds of millions of people, and many Qing officials treated it as a regional problem on the coast. But it exposed the weakness of the Qing military, added a large financial burden, and deepened economic and social strains in the south. Unrest in the region contributed to the conditions in which the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, one of the deadliest civil wars in history, though historians debate how direct this connection was.

The war also prompted new thinking. Lin Zexu had collected translated information about foreign countries, and the scholar Wei Yuan used this material in his Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo tuzhi, 1843), which urged China to learn the techniques of the foreigners in order to resist them. This book was also read in Japan, where news of China’s defeat alarmed officials and scholars and fed debates that preceded Japan’s own opening in the 1850s. Joseon Korea learned of the war through its envoys to Beijing, and it strengthened concerns about Western ships.

For Britain, the war secured Hong Kong, which grew into a major port and remained a British colony until 1997, and it opened China further to British trade. The opium trade remained highly profitable for British India. At the same time, the war provoked lasting criticism in Britain from those who saw it as a war fought to protect drug smuggling.

In the People’s Republic of China, official historiography dates the beginning of China’s modern history (jindaishi) to 1840, the year of the British expedition. The war stands at the start of the “century of humiliation”, which ends with the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and it is taught as a story of foreign aggression, Qing weakness and heroic resistance by figures such as Lin Zexu and the people of Sanyuanli. The Opium War Museum at Humen and Lin’s statues and memorials reflect this memory. When Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, the war was widely recalled as the origin of a wrong now put right.

In Britain, the war was for a long time presented, when it was remembered at all, as a conflict about free trade, diplomatic equality and the arrogance of the Qing court, with opium as a side issue. This view drew on arguments made by Palmerston and the merchant lobby at the time. Critics then and later rejected it, and most modern historians, in Britain and elsewhere, accept that protecting the opium trade and the revenue it provided was central to British policy, even if other issues also mattered.

Recent scholarship has tried to move beyond both national narratives. Julia Lovell’s The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011) examines both the war and the way its memory was shaped and reshaped in China, including its use in modern Chinese nationalism. Stephen R. Platt’s Imperial Twilight (2018) sets the war in the long history of Anglo-Chinese relations before 1839, stressing contingency and the role of individuals. Mao Haijian’s The Collapse of the Heavenly Dynasty (in Chinese 1995; English translation The Qing Empire and the Opium War, 2016) used Qing archives to give a critical account of Qing decision-making, challenging simpler heroic narratives within China.

Economic historians have also debated the war’s causes. The traditional view held that opium imports drained China’s silver, causing an economic crisis. Lin Man-houng, in China Upside Down (2006), argued that a fall in world silver supply, linked in part to the Latin American wars of independence, also played a major role in China’s silver shortage. Such work does not deny the harm of opium but places the crisis in a global economic context.

Historians of the war draw on a rich but uneven body of sources. On the Qing side, the most important are the memorials (reports) sent by officials to the emperor and the emperor’s edicts and comments, preserved in the imperial archives and published in large documentary collections from the 1930s onward. Lin Zexu’s own diaries, letters and memorials survive, and they reveal both his determination and his limited information about Britain.

On the British side there are parliamentary papers, Foreign Office records, the correspondence of Palmerston, Elliot and Pottinger, merchant records such as those of Jardine Matheson, and many memoirs and journals by officers and soldiers. These sources are detailed about military operations but often dismissive of Chinese perspectives, and casualty figures for Chinese soldiers and civilians in British reports are usually rough estimates.

Voices of ordinary people, such as villagers, fishermen, opium users and the Indian soldiers who fought for Britain, are much harder to recover. Local gazetteers, popular songs and placards, and later oral traditions in places like Sanyuanli offer some evidence, but they were often recorded later and shaped by political purposes. Historians therefore compare Chinese and British accounts carefully, and debates continue about the scale of casualties and the meaning of events like Sanyuanli.

Visual sources matter too. British prints and paintings celebrated naval victories, while Chinese images and later museum displays emphasized resistance. Projects such as MIT’s Visualizing Cultures have collected these images to show how each side pictured the war.