Darjeeling (6 page)

A significant amount was sent on to the American colonies, which by 1760 were brewing tea from more than 1 million pounds of leaves a year.
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Taxes on the tea became the focus of colonial anger, which culminated in the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when protesters dumped some ninety thousand pounds of tea into the harbor. This led to rebellion and ultimately to the colonies’ declaring independence in the face of corporate and governmental greed.

Even with the taxes and high transport costs, tea was the Company’s most important commodity. At the end of the eighteenth century it was more profitable than all other goods combined, accounting for 60 percent of the company’s total trade. (It had also become the most profitable item on a London grocer’s shelf.)
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British demand seemed insatiable. In 1800,
the East India Company sold a staggering 25,378,816 pounds of it.
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During the 1809–10 trading season, tea accounted for sales worth nearly £3.5 million. That same season, spices totaled just £150,000, or about 4 percent of tea’s amount. In 1817, tea imports topped 36 million pounds.
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Paying the Chinese for so much tea was a significant—and growing—problem. The British had to buy it with silver, specifically Spanish silver reals minted in Mexico.
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The Chinese wanted nothing else from the British. Notoriously xenophobic and self-sufficient with a highly developed manufacturing industry, the Middle Kingdom preferred its own goods over all others.
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Aside from some cotton goods from India, namely the fine muslins and calicoes woven in Bengal, they wanted little else. The Chinese had no desire for woolens milled in the British Midlands or blue Wedgwood plates and only wanted so many clocks and other knickknacks, and, anyway, most imports sold for a loss.
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“Strange and costly objects do not interest me,” the Qianlong Emperor wrote to his counterpart, George III, after an early and unsuccessful British trade mission to China. “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on strange objects and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
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Tea’s trade imbalance deeply concerned the British government. It was draining the country’s silver reserves. The British needed to find a Chinese demand or to create one.
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At last they found a commodity that satisfied both criteria.

When Vasco da Gama reached the southern Indian city of Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498, he was greeted rather hostilely by Muslim merchants. “May the devil take thee! What brought you hither?” they wanted to know, the Portuguese explorer recorded in his journal,
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to which he famously replied, “Christians and spices.” When the English arrived a century later, they came searching mostly for spices. But they found another, more lucrative crop being cultivated on the subcontinent under the Mughals that would prove to be a tonic for Britain’s one-way commerce with the Chinese and a means of halting the bullion drain:
Papaver somniferum
. Opium.

Opium most likely arrived with Arab traders, perhaps by the middle of the ninth century, and was being grown on the subcontinent by the end of the fifteenth century.
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(The Hindi
aphim
and Sanskrit
ahifen
, which also means snake venom, derive from the Arabic
afyun
.) In the 1590s, Abu’l-Fazl, intimate adviser to Akbar—the great Mughal leader
who ruled over much of South Asia—and gifted historian to his reign (1556–1605), described the opium production in Fatehphur, Allahabad, and Ghazipur in northern India. Opium was, Fazl wrote, a controlled monopoly of the state.
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When William Hastings was appointed the first governor-general in 1773, he publically opposed the trade. “The drug is not a necessity of life but a pernicious article of luxury which ought not to be permitted. I shall stamp it out,” he told his new bosses.
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He brought the opium trade in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa under Company control, but quickly changed his tune about stopping it.

Just as the Mughals had, the British saw the trade as a natural right. “Thus the State Monopoly in Opium and the policy which is practically that pursued at the present day, was a hereditary gift to the British successors of the great Mogul Empires,” a Department of Revenue and Agriculture publication stated in the late-nineteenth century.
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The Company simply expanded distribution from the national market in India to China and increased production. The first shipment of Indian opium arrived in the port of Canton the same year Hastings took office.

Nineteenth-century India had two key areas of opium production. Patna, in Bihar along the Ganges, was the capital of India’s main opium industry. Here it was grown and manufactured under the aegis of the East India Company. An important factory was located in Patna, as well as another large one in Ghazipur, to the east of Benares. The second area was in a collection of independent, princely states located largely in the Punjab and collectively referred to as Malwa, which initially shipped from the Gujarati port of Cambray (now Khambhat). The British held the monopoly on the country’s trade and did all they could to thwart competition from Malwa, mainly by encircling the area and charging exorbitant rates to transit across their land. The Chinese considered Malwa opium to have a “higher touch,” according to an 1839 report of the Official Records of the Colonial Office, “but not so mellow, nor so pleasant in flavor as the Patna opium.”
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Along the Gangetic plain, Company agents forced peasants to stop farming traditional food crops, such as winter vegetables, wheat, and dal, and plant only poppies. In the dry, cool weather of late autumn, they scattered opium seeds around their fields. By the new year, plants stood a few feet high and were beginning to bloom. As the heat of the plains intensified in February and March, the pale-pink and blanched-crimson-colored petals fell, and the bulbous seed capsules grew globular and waxy.
When the pods were turning from yellow to pale green—that is, quite mature but not fully ripe—workers lanced them using a set of sharp blades mounted in a wood handle. Milky, latexlike sap seeped out from the vertical slits overnight and, in the air, turned a gummy brown. Workers returned at dawn to scrape the resin off the capsules with a curved trowel and place the raw opium into an earthen pot hanging at their waists. The pods remained viable for just a dozen or so days until reaching full maturity, during which time lancing and scraping were repeated a handful of times.

Brought to the factory, the raw opium was processed, molded into spherical cakes six inches in diameter and weighing just over three pounds, and stacked on towering shelves to dry and harden. In autumn, once the rains had passed, the balls were weighed and valued, wrapped in a lattice of pressed opium petals, and packed into mango-wood chests that held about 120 pounds of the drug. These were then shipped a few hundred miles downstream to Calcutta to be sold at auction.

While the Company controlled every aspect of the production and even placed its seal on the opium as an imprimatur of quality, once it was sold to independent merchants who operated under Company license, it was no longer the Company’s concern.
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It officially turned its head on what happened after that. Private traders organized transport to Canton, the only port open for foreigners to trade.

But opium was illegal in China. The ships passed through the archipelago at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, with Macao and its small community of Portuguese on the port side and forest-covered Hong Kong on the starboard, and anchored at Whampoa, still about ten miles shy of Canton, to off-load their cargo. Lithe boats with many oarsman evocatively called “fast crabs” and “scrambling dragons” carried the opium chests swiftly to shore for distribution, up the coastline, and into the interior on caravans of donkeys and camels.

“As tea and opium could not be bartered directly, opium was sold for silver, which in turn paid for tea,” explained tea scholar John Griffiths. “This suited Western merchants very well, for it saved them a long journey in pirate-infested waters with cargoes of silver.”
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To cover the cost of a steadily increasing demand for tea (and silver), opium had to made “a ‘commodity,’” wrote the Australian historian Carl Trocki, “to organize its production with a force of cheap and malleable labor, on land that was already controlled for as cheap a price as possible. It would be necessary to create centralized control over collection and
processing of the product. It was also necessary to gain access to the market where it could be consumed on a mass basis.” The British accomplished that.

But they also had to increase demand. Or, as Trocki put it, “It was necessary to create an opium epidemic in Asia.”
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They eventually accomplished that, too.

Opium had been used in China for centuries, but its lethal form of consumption by smoking had only gained a foothold from Dutch traders who laced their tobacco with a pinch of opium and arsenic. Eventually the tobacco and other additives fell away, and by the mid-eighteenth century, opium was smoked alone in long, tubelike pipes. With streamlined production and increased flow of the drug out of India, there were, by the end of the 1830s, upward of 12 million opium smokers in China,
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perhaps 2 million of them addicts.
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Addiction riddled every level of society, from the highest officials in the central government on down. The British realized the effects of their contraband and actively undermined efforts to slow, much less stop, the problem. The Chinese court even made a personal, ethical appeal to the twenty-year-old Queen Victoria. It was ignored. But how could it be otherwise?

For the East India Company, the opium trade was crucial to its solvency and yielded it some £2 million a year. By the early 1800s, it was the leading source of revenue for the Company. But it was also the second-largest one for the government of British India after land taxes, regularly contributing more than 15 percent of the total.
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And taxes on tea back in Britain, which the opium effectively purchased, were adding at least £3 million annually to the coffers of the Exchequer, nearly 10 percent of the revenue from the whole of England.
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That amount covered half of the expenses of the mighty Royal Navy, which dominated the globe’s seas.
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The opium trade was too important to stop—or allow to be stopped.

However, that is exactly what the Chinese emperor—officially, “Son of Heaven and Lord of Ten Thousand Years”—tried to do. He appointed a special emissary to Canton, the morally upright Lin Zexu. (His
nickname was Blue Sky, referring to his supposedly clear and incorruptible nature.)
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Lin made sixteen hundred arrests, closed the channel that led to Canton, effectively blockading the port, and publically destroyed some twenty thousand chests of opium held in foreign warehouses. It took workers three weeks to dissolve 3 million pounds of the drug in pits and watch it be swept out to sea by the currents.
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In response, Britain launched a war to force the Chinese to open their ports to the trade. The First Opium War (1839–42) was a prolonged, intermittent, and lopsided affair, with Britain’s superior weapons crushing the emperor’s far more numerous troops, who carried muskets, flintlocks, pikes, and bows and arrows. Lin, scapegoat for the humiliating defeat, was recalled to Peking and sentenced to death. “You have been no better than a wooden doll,” the emperor told him.
^47
*

The Treaty of Nanking, ending the First Opium War, resulted in the opening of five ports for foreign trade: Canton, Amoy, Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningpo (Ninbo), and Shanghai. As well, China ceded Hong Kong, then a minor outpost, where British citizens were exempt from Chinese jurisdiction and would be held accountable by their own laws rather than local ones. It also included an indemnity payment to Britain of $21 million, about half of China’s total tax revenues for the year, to cover war costs and compensation to traders for the destroyed opium. China, though, refused to legalize opium, and Henry Pottinger, who negotiated the treaty for the British, did not insist. Opium is not mentioned anywhere in the document.

While tea imports to Britain jumped from 32 million pounds in 1834 to 56.5 million pounds by 1846,
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the terms of the treaty, and their protracted implementation, did not appease the British for long. With several of the key points disputed, they launched the Second Opium War in 1856. They handily won this, too, and burned down the vast and sumptuous imperial Summer Palace in spiteful vengeance. Not unexpectedly, the new treaty reached further with British demands. The victors demanded all ports be opened, British goods be exempt from import duties, foreigners be allowed to travel across the country, missionaries given free and unrestricted right to spread Christianity, and the establishment of a full embassy in
Peking (Beijing) with a British diplomat in residence. Another large indemnity payment was also stipulated—and continued access to China’s tea. “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea,” the
Illustrated London News
happily reported.
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And this time, opium was to be completely legalized.

On the eve of the First Opium War, some forty thousand chests of the drug—about 5.5 million pounds—had been shipped to China;
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within two decades after the Second Opium War, the opium trade had more than doubled. Imports hit 93,000 chests in 1872 and 112,000 chests—nearly 16 million pounds—a decade later.
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By the time the British had launched the First Opium War in 1839, though, the East India Company had begun intensively searching for other sources of
their
national addiction: tea. Under public pressure demanding cheaper tea, the Crown broke the Company’s long-running monopoly on importing it in 1833. The first non-Company consignment of tea shipped out of China was by Jardine, Matheson & Co., the largest and most famous of the opium merchants.
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