Tea (19 page)

A new emperor, Tao Kuang, came to throne in
1819
, and hostilities between foreign merchants and the Chinese authorities began to increase. In
1830
, the horror of the situation was intimately revealed to the Chinese emperor when his son died of an opium overdose.

In
1830
, China imported over
2
.
5
million pounds of Indian opium, and the trade in opium was even more lucrative than the tea trade. There were an estimated
12
.
5
million opium smokers in China by
1836
.

The paths of opium, tea, and silver were inextricably intertwined. For decades, the British and other Western nations had poured Mexican silver into China to pay for tea and other commodities. Between
1800
and
1810
, the British paid an estimated
983
tons of silver to the Chinese, primarily for tea. With the arrival of Indian opium, this flow of silver reversed. From
1830
to
1840
, the Chinese traded
366
tons of silver to the British, primarily for opium grown in India but controlled by the British. At one time there were nearly one million people working in the Indian opium industry.

Not unlike drug trafficking today, the opium trade created astronomical profits. The British government not only knew about the illegal trade, they encouraged it, thus encouraging opium addiction as well. They were devastatingly successful at it, opening new ports along the Chinese coast and finding new addicts.

Americans, too, were involved in the opium trade in China. Since the Indian opium market was under the monopoly of the British East India Company, Americans bought opium in Turkey and shipped it to China. At its height, however, the American opium trade was only one-twentieth the size of the British.

Growing Tensions

As tensions between China and England escalated, the problem could be encapsulated in a single statement: both nations felt that they were the greatest power on earth. The British, at the height of their extraordinary expansionism, felt as if their king deserved honor and respect from all peoples throughout the globe. The Chinese, who believed that they were descended from the gods and that their emperor was the Son of Heaven, thought that all other people were inferior to them. It was these attitudes, as much as conflicts in trade and economics, that fueled the increasing tensions between the two nations.

According to their charter, the British East India Company was scheduled to give up their monopoly on trade with China in April of
1834
. In spite of protestations by the company, other European trading nations insisted that the terms of the charter be upheld. Unwilling to give up its position of leadership in China, the British government decided to assign a diplomatic official to replace the ruling committee of the company. To this end, the British Cabinet created a Chief Superintendency of Trade in Canton and awarded consular status to this position.

Lord William Napier was the first to be chosen as chief superintendent. Although the British had awarded him consular status, the Chinese had not, and they refused to acknowledge him as a high-ranking diplomat. When Napier sent word to the Chinese court that he was coming to meet with officials, they responded that he must wait for the emperor to call for him.

Napier was incensed and sailed to Canton anyway. If he could not meet with the emperor, he stated, the only other person he would talk with was the viceroy, the highest-ranking officer of the Hong, the group of Chinese merchants who controlled foreign trade. Unfortunately, members of the Hong were notoriously corrupt and were often bribed to turn a blind eye to much of the dealings with Western traders, including and especially those in the opium trade.

The Chinese viceroy refused to see Napier, told Hong members to send him home, and threatened severe punishment if they did not. Napier, still expecting to be treated as a high-ranking diplomat, continued to wait in Canton. The viceroy retaliated by capturing a British factory. He demanded that all the Chinese workers be sent home and ordered Napier to leave the country. Finally, he dictated a severe reduction in the tea trade, to go into effect immediately, and ordered that these measures were to stay in place until Napier left Canton. Napier refused, and the situation continued to escalate until Napier became quite ill with a fever, from which he eventually died at the port of Macau.

The British did not give up, of course, but sent other officials to deal with the situation. The Chinese were desperately concerned about the rampant opium addiction in the country and were determined to stop the opium trade. In
1838
, the emperor appointed a new official, Lin Tse-hsu, to oversee the opium problem. Lin was scrupulously honest and passionate about stopping opium addiction. He demanded the surrender of all opium held by foreign merchants. When the Western traders did not comply, he stopped all trade with Britain, blockaded factories, and arrested many of the corrupt Hong officials.

The British leader in Canton at this time was Captain Charles Elliot, who personally also opposed the opium trade. Elliot responded to Lin's actions by ordering the British merchants to hand over all the chests of opium they had on board their ships, some twenty thousand chests. Lin accepted and destroyed all the opium.

Both Elliot and the British traders believed that their government would cover their losses, but government officials felt otherwise. They were furious. Elliot had accrued a bill for about nine million Mexican silver dollars' worth of opium (one Mexican dollar was worth about £
2
.
5
in the mid-nineteenth century, which is about £
169
, or $
335
, today). And, in addition, he had openly acknowledged the existence of the opium, and by doing so, inadvertently accepted official responsibility for the illegal trade.

The Opium Wars

The British response to the situation was to send warships to Canton, where they quickly and efficiently destroyed Lin's army, in
1840
, thus beginning the first Opium War. For the Chinese, it was a devastating war from the very beginning.

Even though the Chinese had actually invented gunpowder, they had never experienced anything like modern warfare. Their guns were fixed, making aim most difficult and trajectory poor. Many of the cannonballs went only a short distance. Such weaponry was ineffective against the superior British guns and cannons, and the Chinese quicklyfled. The British persevered and soon had control of Canton and other parts of China. Fearing an attack on the capital city of Peking and the end of the imperial regime, Chinese officials finally persuaded their own emperor to sue for peace.

The result was the Treaty of Nanking, signed on August
29
,
1842
. Terms of the treaty opened up the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai and gave Hong Kong to the British in perpetuity. In addition, England was awarded a “most favored nation” status in China. The Chinese were forced to pay for the lost opium and the cost of the war. Although the British also tried to convince the Chinese to legalize opium, the Emperor stood firm, saying, “nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people.”

The Chinese were both defeated and devastated. Much of the populace was firmly in the clutches of opium addiction, the government was unstable, and the morale of the people was painfully low as they realized that their country, which they had believed to be invincible, had been defeated by a tiny island halfway around the world.

Thus, the illegal opium trade continued, as did the Chinese resistance to it. The British were far from satisfied
with the Treaty of Nanking and were impatient to open more ports and to legalize opium. The result was a second Opium War in
1856
. Again, the British won easily, and the Emperor was again forced to negotiate to save Peking, resulting in the Treaty of Tientsin, in
1858
. Even more ports were opened to foreigners, and Christian missionaries were allowed in. Eventually, the Chinese did legalize opium, and England continued to export Indian opium to China until
1911
.

The tea trade was unaffected by the wars and disputes during the
1840
s and
1850
s, and profits continued to rise as tea became more and more important in English daily life. In
1836
, John Barrow wrote in the British
Quarterly Magazine
, “It is a curious circumstance 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.”

GROWING TEA IN INDIA

The British had been aware for decades that tea plants were indigenous to India. Native shrubs were found growing in Assam as early as
1778
, and there were rumors that the Assamese drank tea. Joseph Banks, a British botanist who accompanied Captain Cook during his long third voyage between
1776
and
1780
, wrote that he believed tea could be grown successfully in northern India. The British had long been interested in growing tea in India, but as long as the China trade offered such high profits, this interest remained only academic.

In
1823
, the British trader Robert Bruce went to Assam, where he learned of the existence of tea plants and became fascinated with the idea of cultivating tea in India. In
1826
, the British government, with the support of the East India Company, annexed the region of Assam. This area, consisting almost completely of the valley of the upper Brahmaputra River, was a harsh, inhospitable land, very flat, and for the most part only three hundred feet above sea level. High temperatures and humidity made conditions stultifying throughout the year. Although hardly ideal for human habitation, the climate proved excellent for growing a huge variety of plants, including tea.

Robert Bruce was soon joined by his brother, Charles, who was commanding troops in the Assam region. The two
brothers were tireless in their attempts to grow tea and were finally successful enough to send samples of their plants to Dr. Nathaniel Wallich, botanist for the East India Company. Other British traders, equally interested in the possibilities of growing tea in India, had also sent samples from wild tea shrubs they had found. Inexplicably, Wallich was slow to confirm that these samples were actually the tea plant, but finally on Christmas Eve,
1834
, he declared that, indeed, the samples were of the tea shrub, which we now classify as
Camellia sinensis
var.
assamica
, and that they must be indigenous to Upper Assam. He stated, “We are perfectly confident that the tea plant which has been brought to light, will be found capable, under proper management, of being cultivated with complete success for commercial purposes.”

We know today that
Camellia sinensis
var.
assamica
is indigenous to many warm regions, including Assam, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. It grows much larger than the tea plants indigenous to China (
Camellia sinensis
var.
sinensis
) and can reach heights of seventeen meters (fifty-six feet) or more, but are kept pruned to a more manageable size in the tea gardens or plantations. These warm region tea plants have large leathery leaves, grow quickly, and live to be about forty years old.