ABSTRACT
Today, with the additional span of one and a half centuries behind us, we can review the events leading up to the Opium War in a perspective quite different from that of our predecessors, even though the basic facts remain unchanged. Lin Zexu, the imperial commissioner at Guangzhou, exercised sufficient initiative to compose a letter to Queen Victoria and had more than twenty copies of it made so that every European ship sailing home could be entrusted to convey the message, one that asked for the voluntary suspension of the opium trade by Britain. Yet Lin minimized the importance of the news that in England warships were gathered in preparation for an expedition to China as no more than "an intimidating gesture designed to scare us." On the one hand he inquired about Emeric de Vattel's Law of Nations; on the other he enforced Chinese prohibitory laws, which were in the statute books but so far had been ignored by everybody, with a sudden severity and urgency characteristic of traditional Chinese legal practice. Above all, his principal method of enforcing the laws took the form of "group responsibility," that is, rounding up offenders by categories and
Charles Elliot, of course, had no intention of solving the problem by peaceful means. He urged the British merchants to surrender the opium to him, and, as the superintendent of trade, handed it over to Lin, to make the commissioner responsible to the British Crown for the goods thus confiscated and destroyed. It provided the grounds for the later demand for compensation, set at a value of six million dollars and to be a part of the twenty-one-million-dollar war indemnities that the British were able to extract from the Chinese. The way that the Daoguang Emperor (personal name: Minning, reigned 1821-1850) conducted his office throughout this sequence of events could never be considered fair or even-handed. He demanded from his officials more than they could possibly accomplish; he encouraged them to act boldly, yet when things went wrong he did not hesitate for a moment to mete out the death sentence, although, by custom, the penalty was commuted to exile to the frontier provinces.
