Background

The opium trade emerged from the structural trade imbalance between Britain and China through the late 18th and early 19th centuries. British demand for Chinese tea (and to a lesser extent silk and porcelain) was substantial and growing; Chinese demand for British (or British-Indian) products was almost negligible. The resulting trade deficit was settled in silver. By the late 18th century the silver outflow from Britain to China was a substantial pressure on the European money supply.

The British East India Company solved the imbalance, beginning around 1781, by cultivating opium in Bengal and selling it via independent country traders to Chinese coastal smugglers. The trade was illegal in China (the Qing government had banned opium consumption in 1729) but was tolerated by local Chinese officials in exchange for substantial bribes. The volume grew rapidly: from approximately 200 chests per year (each chest approximately 140 lbs) in 1729 to approximately 4,000 chests/year by 1790, 18,000 chests/year by 1830, and approximately 30,000 chests/year by 1838 — roughly 1,900 tonnes of opium per year, with an estimated 4–12 million Chinese addicts.

The Qing imperial response — increasingly serious enforcement of the existing prohibition through the 1830s — produced the political-diplomatic crisis that triggered the war.

The First Opium War (1839–1842)

The trigger was the appointment of Commissioner Lin Zexu to suppress the opium trade at Canton in 1839. Lin confiscated and destroyed approximately 1,200 tonnes of British-owned opium (worth approximately £2 million, or roughly £250 million in modern terms) at Humen between 3 June and 23 June 1839. The Chinese government’s claim was that the opium was contraband and properly subject to seizure under Chinese law; the British government’s position was that the seizure was uncompensated theft of British property.

A British expeditionary force arrived in 1840: approximately 4,000 troops and 16 warships (later reinforced to approximately 20,000 troops and 25 ships). The Qing imperial military system — a substantial standing force of approximately 800,000, but trained, organized, and equipped to early-Qing 17th-century standards — was unable to engage Western steam-powered warships and modern infantry firearms on remotely competitive terms. The war was a sequence of British naval and amphibious operations along the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze, against which the Qing forces could not effectively defend.

The war ended at the Treaty of Nanking (29 August 1842):

  • Five Chinese ports — Canton, Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ningbo), and Shanghai — opened to British commercial residence and trade (“the Treaty Ports”).
  • An indemnity of approximately £21 million paid to Britain.
  • Hong Kong Island ceded in perpetuity to Britain.
  • Fixed-tariff schedule for British imports (effectively eliminating Chinese tariff sovereignty over the affected trade).
  • Most-favoured-nation status: any concession given to a third country would automatically apply to Britain.

The Treaty of Nanking was the first of what Chinese historiography subsequently called the Unequal Treaties that would progressively reshape the Sino-Western relationship over the next century.

The Second Opium War (1856–1860)

The First Opium War’s settlement had not in fact legalized the opium trade (only the trade in licit goods). Smuggling continued; the volume of opium trade actually increased after the 1842 settlement. British, French, and American merchants pressed for further treaty concessions including formal legalization of opium and additional treaty ports.

The pretext for renewed war was the Arrow Incident (October 1856), in which Chinese officials at Canton boarded a Hong Kong-registered ship called the Arrow and arrested its (Chinese) crew. The British government — using a constructive reading of the Arrow’s registration that some legal scholars consider questionable — treated the boarding as an insult to the British flag and an act of war.

The Second Opium War was substantially larger than the first. British and French forces (the French joined on a separate pretext involving the execution of a French missionary in Guangxi) progressively pushed up the Chinese coast and inland. The most consequential single event was the sack and burning of the Old Summer Palace (the Yuanmingyuan) outside Peking by British and French forces in October 1860 — an act of deliberate cultural destruction by Lord Elgin’s order, intended as retaliation for the Qing torture-execution of British and French diplomatic prisoners.

The war ended at the Treaty of Tientsin (1858, ratified at the Convention of Peking, October 1860):

  • Eleven additional treaty ports opened, including the entire Yangtze valley and major interior cities.
  • Foreign diplomatic representation at Peking (the Qing emperor had previously refused all permanent foreign embassies).
  • Christian missionary access to all of China.
  • Opium trade formally legalized (taxed at a fixed low rate).
  • Substantial additional indemnities.
  • Kowloon (the peninsula north of Hong Kong island) ceded to Britain.

Consequences

The Opium Wars produced the political-economic-diplomatic system — the Treaty Port system of foreign concessions, extraterritorial jurisdiction, fixed low tariffs, and substantial European commercial-cultural presence in China — that would define the Sino-Western relationship from 1842 until approximately 1943, when the British and American governments formally abrogated the unequal treaty system during the Second World War.

The treaty system substantially weakened the Qing imperial state. Approximately 80% of Chinese government revenue by the late 19th century came through the Imperial Maritime Customs — administered by foreign (mostly British) officials whose appointments were effectively imposed by treaty. The Qing’s capacity for fiscal self-direction was substantially constrained. The political-economic conditions that produced the late-19th-century rebellions (the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, which killed approximately 20 million people; the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901), the 1911 Republican Revolution, the Warlord Era, and ultimately the Chinese Civil War and 1949 Communist victory descend directly from the disruption initiated in the 1839–1842 war.

In modern Chinese political-historical consciousness the Opium Wars are the foundational moment of the Century of Humiliation — the hundred-year period from 1839 to 1949 during which China was systematically subordinated to Western (and from the 1890s, Japanese) imperial intervention. The political-cultural recovery from this period has been the explicit organizing principle of Chinese political identity since 1949 and continues to shape Chinese foreign policy and political rhetoric to the present.

Hong Kong, ceded to Britain in 1842 and 1860 and extended on lease in 1898, was returned to China on 1 July 1997 — the conventional end of the British colonial system in East Asia and a moment of substantial symbolic weight in Chinese political history.