Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [33]
In 1836, however, the Chinese emperor issued an order that, unlike champagne, opium was no longer to be either imported or used in China. The traders were not especially worried, since they had had little difficulty in finding corrupt officials willing, for a price, to turn a blind eye. But this occasion proved to be different. In March 1839 a new, incorruptible official was appointed to enforce the emperor’s will. Apart from destroying existing stocks of the drug, Lin Zexu tried to appeal to Queen Victoria’s better nature by letter. In the name of humanity he begged her to halt a trade which was enslaving so many of his countrymen and warned her that if the British did not stop shipping opium from India, he would ensure it was destroyed on arrival in China. His letter never reached the queen, who anyway did not possess the powers which the Chinese emperor took for granted. Soon the official had laid siege to the warehouses, or ‘factories’, in which the foreigners stored their drugs in Canton. Once the dealers had surrendered their opium, he expelled them from China. Twenty thousand cases of opium were then crushed, shovelled into pits or dissolved in the sea.
Now the only way for the British traders to return to China was by force. Their problem was that not everyone shared their dewy-eyed enthusiasm for drug-dealing. Matheson was especially worried about the attitude of the Church and wrote to William Jardine suggesting that they line up some congenial journalists to make their case in the newspapers. Opposition to the trade was not without its own powerful voices. The young MP William Gladstone (who was to see the consequences of drug dependency for himself when his troubled sister, Helen, became addicted) declared that ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war calculated in its progress to cover this country with a permanent disgrace, I do not know and I have not read of’. But the traders had friends in high places, while with serpentine casuistry Jardine argued that the problem of the drug business lay not with suppliers but with buyers, claiming that once the British had sold the product to the Chinese intermediaries who would ferry it ashore it ceased to be their responsibility. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was soon making a similar case in his speeches. While the British government did not for a moment dispute the right of the Chinese to determine what did or did not come into their country, it simply could not stand idle when they tried to stop British citizens earning an honest living.
By June 1840, British ships and troops were arriving off the coast of China. (The traders seized the opportunity to send their own vessels, too, laden with opium.) The Chinese fatally underestimated the technological superiority of the British forces. The governor of the province at the mouth of the Yangtze River sent the emperor the reassuring news that it would be deadly for the British to put soldiers ashore, since their legs were so stiff and their trousers so tight they could not get up if they fell over. His strategic advice also included the judgement that the British would be at a serious disadvantage because they had insufficient bows and arrows. In the event, the British naval force included a weapon never seen in combat before. The Nemesis, an iron-clad, steam-powered, paddle-driven gunboat of 184 feet, had been built in Liverpool and could make short work of the Chinese junks. It was commanded by a remarkably skilled captain and its draught was shallow enough to allow the invaders to navigate the rivers. Thousands more troops followed,