Some Gross Insult

‘A long course of impunity will beget hardihood,’ wrote Captain Elliot to the Foreign Office about the opium trade on 27 July 1836. And he continued:

And at last some gross insult will be perpetrated, that the Chinese authorities will be constrained to resent; they will be terrified and irritated, and will probably commit some act of cruel violence that will make any choice but armed interference, impossible to our own Government. ¹

In other words, if the British Government did not take action to curb the opium trade, all parties involved would become so over-confident, greedy and enmeshed in mutual misunderstanding that an untoward incident would tip the British and Chinese into war. It was to take just three years.