Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age

How the Opium Wars echo in the USA's fentanyl crisis and trade war

An echo of the Opium Wars in nineteenth century China sounds today when the USA starts a trade war with the world by blaming China for its fentanyl crisis. But the real history of the Opium Wars is more tragic still. No one really wanted war; but war was what they got.

Welcome to the second week of my World History Tour of China. This week’s history book recommendation is Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2018).

This book concentrates on the First Opium War (1839–1842) fought between China and Britain. Britain coerced China to open its society to trade in opium, harvested in British imperial India and sold by British merchants in Canton. Through military action, Britain diplomatically seized the treaty port of Hong Kong. It was one factor among others in the decline of Qing China, as I discussed in my deep dive this week: Opium, Gunboats, Rebellions and Unequal Treaties: How Modern China Was Forged.

Another Unthinkable War

You might think you know the story of the Opium War. It is shrouded in both Orientalist and Anti-Imperialist legend. Stephen Platt’s narrative will change your mind. He shows you that there was not destined war inevitably arising from the 1800s competition between China and the West. The key players stumbled and blustered into a tragic war that unleashed even more terrible consequences for China.

“The Opium War did not result from an intractable clash of civilizations, as it would later be framed in the West. Neither did it represent the culmination of some grand imperial master plan, as it is generally understood in China. To nearly all parties concerned, including even the government ministers who launched it, the war was all but unthinkable until it actually began.”

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, xxvii

There is a lesson there for us today, especially in elite circles of most countries of the world. Platt urges us to remember not just the British and American drug-peddlers but the activists who opposed the opium trade; to recall the “Chinese scholars who counselled pragmatism in foreign relations”; to learn from the “Americans whose relationships with their Chinese counterparts set a more positive pattern than most of the British.” The lessons from this history of the Opium War can be applied to how the USA responds to its opioid crisis; how peace, prosperity and security can be negotiated diplomatically between the five great powers of this World Tour and others like Iran; and how deep is the danger of a trade war, sought by the crusading fantasies of anti-China hawks.

The War Noone Wanted and Everyone Got

Until 1839 Canton, where the conflict and opium trade were centred, was “a largely peaceful intersection of civilizations, an effective centre for an international trade that served as a major engine of the world’s economy.” That peaceful intersection was blown away by a cascade of bad decisions, mixed motives, and the human comedy of governments at the limits of their understanding.

Platt takes us inside the divided minds of the officials, missionaries, scholars, and traders who wrestled with two great problems: opium abuse and the co-existence of at least two great empires, Britain and China, in a changing Eurasia. He avoids abstract caricatures and presents instead complex characters - such as Charles Elliot and Lin Zexu, the British and Chinese officials who sought to solve these two grand problems through specific decisions and negotiations in Canton. They made mistakes, caught up in history-changing events, cultural misunderstandings, flawed institutions, and the limits of their abilities. But critically Platt shows how events could so easily have turned out differently.

“If Charles Elliot had not let his panic get the best of him when he so dramatically overreacted to Lin Zexu’s threats. Or if Lin Zexu had been more open to working with, rather than against, Elliot; if they had cooperated on their shared interest in bringing the British opium smugglers under control. Or if just five members of the House of Commons had voted differently in the early hours of April 10, 1840—we might be looking back on very different lessons from this era.”

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, p. 427)

That last vote of the British Parliament is worth focussing on. When Lord Palmerston, then British Prime Minister, ordered war against China to enforce the opium trade he had to persuade himself, his Cabinet, and the British Parliament. He almost failed. The best-informed member of the British Parliament, George Staunton, had participated in earlier diplomatic missions to China. His conscience swayed in the winds of war. His courage failed too. If he had stood against the pressure of the lobbies for war, his voice would have delivered those five votes that would have prevented the First Opium War, with all its fateful consequences for China, and for Britain’s moral reputation.

French satire showing an Englishman ordering the Emperor of China to buy opium. A Chinese man lies dead on floor with troops in background. The text says: “You must buy this poison immediately. We want you to poison yourself completely, because we need a lot of tea in order to digest our beefsteaks.”

Britain’s pursuit of a war for drugs in China shocked the moral world of liberal Greater Europe in the nineteenth century. In 1841 a Boston children’s magazine published a story of a child in the USA asking her father, “The English won’t come here, will they father, and kill us if we don’t buy their opium and eat it? (p. 413). In 1840, the Chinese official who destroyed warehouses of British drugs, Lin Zexu, wrote directly to Queen Victoria herself asking how Britain could morally justify itself when it sold drugs to China and knew “how hurtful it is to mankind” so much so that Britain banned use of opium within its own country. “By what principle of reason, then,” he wrote, “should these foreigners send in return a poisonous drug, which involves in destruction those very natives of China.” Queen Victoria never read the letter. Twenty years later Lord Elgin looted and burned the Summer Palace during the second Opium War to impose legalised opium on China, despite the humanitarian consequences.

Five votes and one conscience could have changed the course of history. But at least in 1840s Britain they had a debate on war. Today national assemblies do not debate going to war. In Australia, the Parliament has no say even in going to war. In the USA they fight endless covert wars with no legal authority, and fight a tariff war with China, and the world, seemingly without even considering the consequences.

Opium Yesterday, Fentanyl Tomorrow

For me one intriguing dimension of this history was how nineteenth century Chinese officials wrangled with the dilemmas of drug policy, in which field I worked for near two decades. Policy debates on illegal drugs can be distorted by the ghosts of USA policy slogans: the 1919 Volstead Act prohibition of alcohol and the early 1970s Nixon slogan of the ‘war on drugs.’ China’s history of government managing drug abuse predates the USA. In 1729 the father of the Qianlong emperor, the Yongzheng emperor, prohibited the smoking of opium. Platt summarises how Chinese scholars and officials, especially after the growth of British imports from 1800, debated the pros and cons of drug policies that are familiar to me despite being expressed in terms taken from Qing China’s cultural context. Platt shows how the imperial court considered before, during and after both Opium Wars options that I have also advised on. Should the drug be legalised? How can supply be restricted? How can we prevent users from taking up the drug through moral education? How can we treat addicts? How should we punish dealers and those addicts who refuse all offers of help? How can we prevent corruption in the enforcement of the law against the trade?

Platt also show that the First Opium War was only one incident in China’s tragic social and governance crisis of the nineteenth century. Opium abuse worsened after this war. The Second Opium War of 1856 to 1860 and the concurrent Taiping Rebellion made it worse still.

But already by that time, the only limit to the growth of the drug’s use in the Qing Empire was its price, and Chinese farmers were responding by growing poppies and processing large amounts of cheap native opium to compete with the more expensive varieties coming in from India.

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, p. 425)

By the 1870s Chinese growers supplied ten times more opium than Indian importers. Chinese traders displaced most European drug merchants. By 1873, the infamous Jardine, Matheson & Co (the Scottish drug bosses whose interests started the 1839 war) mostly pulled out of the trade. Local, cheaper production of the legalised drug drove up use and addiction. By 1909 China initiated at the Shanghai Conference the world’s first international agreement to control cross-border trade in narcotics. Platt comments that the compromised policies created:

an explosive abundance of cheap domestic narcotics that would create a public health emergency worlds beyond even the most exaggerated estimates of what had existed in the 1830s prior to the Opium War. So much for the virtues of legalization.

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, p. 426)

Well might you question the virtues of legalization when considering the dismaying drug crisis that affects the USA today. Legal pharmaceutical drugs (oxycontin, codeine, fentanyl) have driven the North American opioid epidemic since 2000. Empty rhetoric about the sins of ‘Prohibition’ and the ‘War on Drugs’ do not help to solve this crisis. Nor does blaming China as part of a trade war. The USA will have to face the weaknesses of its own government in managing this problem, as I discussed in this video.

But we have left the USA tour, so let us return to one last thought from Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2018).

Reimagine the “Opium War”

The way in which historical events are named can fix blinkers to our eyes and constrain how we interpret them. Richard Overy renamed the Second World War the Last Imperial War, and redated it to 1931 to 1945. He opened our eyes to a deeper view of history. Names of wars change. Opposing sides of the same war call their dispute by different names. So, it is also with the Opium Wars. Platt informs the reader that in Qing China these wars were not known as the “Opium Wars,” and Western and Chinese grand narratives of this trade dispute have long differed.

“It was the English-speaking world that condemned it as ‘the Opium War’ from the beginning, while Chinese writers through the nineteenth century, including Wei Yuan, simply referred to it as a border dispute or foreign incident. To them opium was a domestic problem and the war was a minor affair in the grand scheme of China’s military history.”

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, p. 426)

After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, amidst widespread social crisis and use of opium to fund political activities by local warlords and later the rebel communist party, Chinese historians changed the name of the dispute, and called it the “Opium War”.

“Only in the 1920s would republican propagandists finally transform it into its current incarnation as the bedrock of Chinese nationalism—the war in which the British forced opium down China’s throat, the shattering start to China’s century of victimhood, the fuel of vengeance for building a new Chinese future in the face of Western imperialism, Year Zero of the modern age.

(Platt, Imperial Twilight, p. 426)

Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age (2018) is a splendid read. If you have only an hour, you can watch an entertaining introduction to the ideas, stories, and characters of the history in this interview of Stephen Platt by the fine historian William Dalrymple.

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand have also just begun a series, “Victorian Narcos,” on the Opium Wars on their Empire podcast. Their style is more BBC popular history, but hopefully they may invite Stephen Platt on as a guest.

Readers who are curious about China’s extraordinary nineteenth century may also want to read Stephen Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012).

Please join me next week for a look at the nationalism of republican China between 1912 and 1937.

Enjoy your Easter and look out for the next instalment of the Slow Read of Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob this Easter Monday. And I will take a deep dive into that story with the guidance of Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping in my Wednesday post.

This Easter please spend some time watching the moving stories of wartime Ukraine told by Ukrainian historian, Marta Hayryshko, in her interview with me. The full interview is now out on YouTube:

Become a paid subscriber to get all the Easter eggs.